Art Review
“Teen Paranormal Romance”
Through January 17, 2014. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays. $5; Free for members. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 535 Means Street, NW. 404-688-1970, www.thecontemporary.org
Bottom line: This group show on the surreal contours of the teenage experience is a mixed bag.
In the gap between the departure of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center curator Stuart Horodner and the recent announcement of new curator Daniel Fuller, the Contemporary has installed an exhibition organized by well-regarded curator Hamza Walker of the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society.
Called “Teen Paranormal Romance,” the show name checks the young adult fiction and film genre of works like “The Hunger Games,” “Twilight,” “True Blood” and Harry Potter, that blend teen protagonists and vampires, werewolves, science fiction and sorcery. That supernatural genre reflects — writ large — the intense feelings of rage, desire, rivalry and misunderstanding that can define the teenage years. Something about death matches and blood-sucking somehow seems to fit the teenage experience with its extreme cliques and burgeoning sexuality. Walker has chosen fertile ground to sow here.
Walker’s group show thus seems apropos in a cultural moment when both teenagers and the supernatural seem very much in vogue and in some instances “Teen Paranormal Romance” succeeds very well. But just as often the show delivers bloodless, oblique work that feels awkwardly wedged into the curator’s theme.
In a group show blending video, sculpture, installation and photography, artists take a variety of different tacks in rendering the heightened sensibility of the teenage moment.`
Anna K.E.’s ”Lucky Weekend” is an interesting distillation of the teenage obsession with fashion and how it can mark one as a member of a specific subculture. On one side of a large wooden facade anchored to the floor with wooden supports hang outfits that suggest certain teen movie archetypes: the artist, the preppy, the raver. On the other side is an abstract artwork in tile that suggests the banal, institutional murals that line high school hallways. Artist Kathryn Andrews’ “Friends and Lovers” shows a similar desire to convey the institutional, sterile, regimented aspects of teenagers’ lives. Her chain-link paddock takes up a large portion of the gallery space, and suggests the fenced off space of a prison yard or high school courtyard. Inside the fence two grinning black bears painted on white concrete walls suggest the ways escape and pleasure can be found even inside confining circumstances.
The paranormal component might not come through in this cerebral group exhibition, even if the show does convey some of the features of the teenage years, specifically the tension between liberation and entrapment and a world of school and rules vying with the abandonment of sex and drinking. Atlanta artist Jill Frank presents a single photograph of a teenager who, based on cues in the image—swimsuit, metal motel balcony and Mardi Gras beads—is enjoying a Spring Break bacchanal. In a strangely elegant, ecstatic gesture, the kid raises a length of rubber tubing to his lips. “Bong” shows what might be, to an outsider, a slightly strange, mysterious gesture and conveys something of the surreal teen experience Walker is after.
The best works in the show play with that sense of confusion and perhaps, a certain fear factor felt by non-teenagers provoked by the very idea of these libidinal, free, exploratory creatures. In the thrillingly hypnotic, surreal video work “Even Pricks” by British artist Ed Atkins—worth the price of admission—a human thumb is the star of this bizarre, sexually suggestive work with the credit sequences of TV reality competition shows. In some ways there is the inference that teenagers, with their close-to-the-surface emotions, sex drives and sense of discovery are the extraterrestrials among us, feared and unknown.
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