Matt Haffner’s ”Half Light,” at Whitespace Gallery through April 13, is a visually arresting phantasmagoria of personal symbolism that begins with the 7-by-15-foot Goddess (Breather of Bees), a mixed media wall piece in which a Black woman emits from her open mouth a swarm of laser-cut bees, which continues beyond the boundaries of the work’s winter-woods landscape and onto the gallery’s brick walls.

Thereafter, the gallery is filled with a succession of large and small winter landscapes, many of them reverse-painted on glass, portraying a variety of mysterious activities, from a woman summoning wolves to men huddled next to an ice-fishing cabin, where they use an auger to drill into the frozen lake.

The human and animal archetypes transmute into surreal amulets in the second gallery, in a dizzying array of forms that mingle ethnic traditions with something like fever dreams. By the time the viewer encounters “Dreams of the Somnambulist,” a cutout figure of a sleeping woman superimposed on a video screen showing drifting clouds, Haffner’s world has taken hold of the viewing experience in an unconventional way that is intended both to disorient and to enlighten. Mingling paintings with two-dimensional cutout figures and three-dimensional life-size sculptures of ravens poised on the floor below them, Haffner’s exhibition is a species of installation art that forces a dramatically fresh encounter.

Credit: FREDRIK BRAUER

Credit: FREDRIK BRAUER

William Downs at Sandler Hudson Gallery

In a remarkable coincidence, in ”A wave touched a cloud,” at Sandler Hudson Gallery through April 20, William Downs has undertaken a very similar combination of small and large-scale works intended to force the viewer to, in his words, “engage with the artwork in a more immersive and dynamic way.” Here, the experience is limited to placement and scale of two-dimensional paintings and drawings, but the rhythm of imagery of overlapping human figures is designed to create a not dissimilar sense of differently dimensioned viewing. Downs’ familiar imagery and visual strategies are at work, but in a singularly new way, and viewers willing to engage fully with the experience will, indeed, experience a subtly changed way of seeing.

‘Recasting Antiquity‘ at Michael C. Carlos Museum

Credit: Courtesy of Michael C. Carlos Museum

Credit: Courtesy of Michael C. Carlos Museum

Transmuted ways of looking are also at work in the too-little-known historical encounter that is the subject of the exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum through May 14. “Recasting Antiquity: Whistler, Tanagra, and the Female Form” deals with how James McNeill Whistler, one of the foremost American painters of the late 19th century, modeled paintings and prints after small terra cotta sculptures from the Hellenistic-era city of Tanagra (and, later, elsewhere) that had been cast from molds, many of them bearing substantial parts of the paint that had once adorned them.

Coming at a moment when artists had grown weary of the celebration of monochromatic Greco-Roman marble statuary, these newly unearthed polychrome figurines of women and goddesses clad in flowing drapery and usually engaged in everyday activities had, for a significant moment, an outsized transformative impact on the popular view of antiquity.

What makes this show a must-see is the subtlety of Whistler’s small drawings, transformed into his newly adapted version of lithographic transfers, combined with the astonishing delicacy of the Tanagra figurines on loan from the Louvre. But the social and art historical dynamics involved make the scholarly but accessible online catalog an essential and compelling complement.

Because of the small scale of the sketches, prints and figures, this exhibition requires close, attentive looking. But it also requires attentive reading of wall text, particularly in the gallery dealing with the 19th-century artworks presented here in actuality or in large-scale wall-mural reproduction. These works reflect the position of Tanagra figures in the marketplaces of antiquity and of the Victorian and Parisian artworld.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting, “Antique Pottery Painter: Sculpturae Vitam insufflat pictura” (”Painting breathes life into sculpture”), of a female artist of the Hellenistic era turning out figurines for sale was itself a marketing tool for Gérôme’s contemporary statuettes imitating the Tanagra style. The Carlos has cleverly juxtaposed a large reproduction of the painting behind a display of a Hellenistic terra-cotta mold and a contemporary cast from it to illustrate how the statuettes were produced.

This gallery also invites viewer interaction with a sheaf of drawings based on Tanagra figures by Atlanta artist Katherine Taylor — an ambitious conflation of scholarship and audience activities usually kept rigorously separate even when in the same exhibition.

Credit: Anne Chauvet

Credit: Anne Chauvet

Steve Seaberg at eyedrum

At a quite different end of the chronological and viewer-experience spectrum, another show requires close attention simply because its spectacle makes it all too easy to miss its main biographical point. ”Steve Seaberg’s Life in Art, Age 9–93: An Inward and Outward Journey,” at eyedrum through April 13, is a career retrospective for a man who has been a fixture in Atlanta experimental art and literature for some 50 years, both as an artist and an “acrobatic poet” who recites his poems while engaging in acrobatics, both solo and collaboratively with younger contemporaries.

Seaberg’s art and life were radicalized by his experiences watching David Alfaro Siqueiros paint “The Torment of Cuauhtémoc” in 1950. By the time he and his wife, Ronnog, moved to Atlanta in 1970, he was committed to social justice in all its dimensions but also to art in forms ranging from easel painting to scrap-wood sculpture.

In Chicago in the years prior to Atlanta, the couple had produced a film of a Chicago blues musician (included in this exhibition) that Wim Wenders later excerpted for use in his PBS-commissioned “The Soul of a Man.” Also in Chicago in the 1960s, Seaberg painted a series of self-portraits and portraits of friends, all of them posing naked.

All of this by itself would make this retrospective worthy of attention, even without its documentation of such Atlanta art world moments as the mass display of naked performance that was witnessed only by the artists themselves, the photographer recording this Atlanta riposte to Spencer Tunick and the neighbors holding a viewing party on their front porch.

The exhibition will feature a live performance (clothed) by Seaberg at the closing on April 13.

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Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Review of African American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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