Summertime theme at Atlanta’s Jennifer Schwartz Gallery not so hot

Bottom line: A lackluster attempt to connect this gallery’s artists under a summertime theme.

It’s summertime and the living is easy. And so is the art, going down as smoothly as sweet tea on a warm summer night, devoid of difficulty, conflict or overthinking. Or at least that’s the way it plays out in “Summer Salon: Home and Away” at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery.

As with many a summer, there are delightful moments, and also many torpid, idle ones in this group show. This small selection of works by a sampling of the gallery’s artists is organized under the ostensible theme of “summer and travel and vacation,” says gallery director Schwartz. “Summer is a time to travel and explore, but also a time to re-center, retreat and find comfort at home,” according to a gallery statement, a rather thin idea that is only sporadically played out in “Summer Salon.” The show features eight artists, many of whom share little more than a certain dreamy, wispy aesthetic — an aesthetic familiar to those who frequent this gallery.

There are flashes of brightness within a mix that can more often feature superficial, tentative work. Kerry Mansfield’s color studies of hang gliders floating through untroubled blue skies are nice enough, with a snapshot feel. But it is the larger of the hang glider trio on view here, “Untitled No. 0077,” in which one solitary glider soars above the ocean, that stands out. The glider appears to reach toward the rays of the sun visible in the corner of the photo, suggesting the Greek myth of Icarus and the perils of soaring too high.

Many of the works are atmosphere-heavy but content-light. Part of that issue may have to do with sampling from only a small portion of some of these artists’ work. A number of the artists appear to deal in narrative series that lose some of their power when shown in abbreviated excerpts next to other artists’ works. Two photographs from Heidi Lender’s “Green Dress Series” feature a young woman wearing a prom-type formal gown and looking adrift in the woods or peering out from an Airstream trailer window. The works have a kind of pretty fashion magazine angst also found in Heather Evans Smith’s equally melodramatic works. The more cloying of the two works by Smith on display here, “Wade,” features a lovely, long-haired lass prone on a wrought iron bed set in the middle of the ocean. It’s a very “Psychology Today” moment of aestheticized, illustrative emotional turmoil.

It’s disappointing to see the promising emerging artist Jeff Rich given such short shrift here. His one photograph, “Steve Harris’s House,” features a ramshackle cabin set in the deep woods (whose branches stripped of leaves indicate winter, not summer). The interior lights of the home glow warmly but the clothesline sagging under the weight of laundry, a ladder propped on the roof and clothes draped on the front porch railing give a sense of psychic disorder. It’s one of the few works in the show that implores you to know more, to wonder about the, one would guess, equally disordered resident of this place.

Far from the “idyllic home” mentioned in the gallery notes, if anything, home seems an unstable, even problematic notion in many of these “Summer Salon” images. Two works by Dave Anderson documenting the interiors of post-Katrina homes with paint-splattered walls and rooms under construction also give a sense of these domestic spaces as stand-ins for their residents’ distress. It’s enough to make you long for fall.