In the high school scheme of things, we tend to think of the artists and the jocks on opposite sides of the cafeteria. But the exhibition “Score: Artists in Overtime,” curated by Hope Cohn at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, makes the case for some surprising parallels between the creatives and the team players.
Multiple artists in “Score” see a shared investment among athletes and artists in intense concentration, repetition, obsessiveness, stamina and solitude — attributes all required for the job at hand. Other artists examine the mechanics and meaning of sports, offering thoughtful examination of this national preoccupation.
Painter Meg Aubrey is one of the stand-outs in this large group show of 20 artists. The juicy colors of her paintings — all blue skies, green playing fields and prosperous-looking, content people — convey the comfort and sense of community that team spirit can provide. Her subjects mug for some unseen camera at tailgate parties and dress in identical sports team colors, toting beers on the way to a sporting event.
Her work captures the ferocious intensity that can surround sports, evident in an image like “The Fans,” where a cadre of mothers sit on the sidelines at a youth sporting event, one of them raising the kind of massive camera to her eye that suggests a war-time photojournalist. Aubrey has always been a gimlet-eyed chronicler of the lockstep tendencies of the suburbs, but here she enlarges her scope, capturing with humor and intelligence the loss of self, group-think and blind allegiance in suburban sports culture.
There are many artists who have something significant to say in “Score,” including Michael Peterson, an accomplished artist who creates incisive sculptures on topics from the use of Native American iconography in sports to the vulnerability of sports figures when their careers end.
Also finding vulnerability in unexpected places, artist Joe Peragine captures a strange delicacy and quiet in his watercolors of high school wrestlers. Substituting the echoing cheers and intensity of competition, Peragine focuses in on the wrestlers, their bodies intertwined, the concentration and also the pathos in their situation.
You might expect cynicism in a show like this and that might be “Score’s” real coup: finding the subtext and significance in sports. Jerry Siegel’s photographs are representative of that message, documenting the gravity of youth sports in the South. But his color photographs also capture a theme of pure hopefulness that often underlies these heady, intense, joyful pursuits.
“Score” also incorporates sports paraphernalia, though to not especially successful ends. There are custom athletic shoes from New Balance and two carbon fiber prosthetic sprinting feet crafted for triathlete and Paralympic runner Sarah Reinertsen. With their bright colors and vanguard design, the objects are visually compelling, but don’t do much to pull together any of the themes in the show.
This would be a far better show with some judicious pruning. Too much work in “Score” suggests a curator with some favorite artists who she longed to include, regardless if their work made sense in the show’s themes.
How else to explain a photograph like Lucinda Bunnen’s “Hatcher’s Pond,” a moody still-life of dead water lilies on a winter pond? Text by the artist strives to make an analogy between those desiccated plant stalks and sports.
“The works may be viewed as playing fields — fields where organic patterns and rhythms mimic the lines drawn on the soccer field, or the game strategies sketched in play books,“ the artist writes.
It is, to use a sports analogy, a long shot. In fact it is the curator’s job to make a convincing case for including disparate work under a thematic umbrella, not the artists’. Several artists shoehorn their signature style into the sports theme, a move executed in wall text where the artists explain the connections. But if the work doesn’t convince, some persuasive language isn’t going to do the job. And those tangential works detract from the truly consequential pieces in the show.
Art Review
“Score: Sports and Art”
Through March 29, 2014. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. $5, non-members; $1, students with ID and seniors 65+; free, children 6 years of age and under, members and active U.S. military. Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 75 Bennett Street, Suite A2. 404-367-8700, www.mocaga.org.
Bottom line: A scattershot show about the connections between sports and art, whose great art tends to be overshadowed by unrelated work.
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