At Edgewood Avenue’s Take It Easy gallery co-director Jamie Steele and gallery assistant Jackson Markovic are putting the finishing touches on the latest exhibition “Titanium.”
They’re following precise instructions about lighting the birthday candles on New York artist Faith Icecold’s sculpture “Jurassic Park.” Icecold has sent instructions about leaving the candles burning for exactly two minutes to leave the desired melted wax residue. But the piece is also located directly underneath the smoke detector in the small gallery space. So concept is butting up against a potential opening night visit from the Atlanta fire department.
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
The current two-person show at Take It Easy pairs Icecold with Atlanta-based artist Caleb Jamel Brown in “Titanium.” The pair met in New York while Brown was attending residencies there and have used their current collaboration to riff on themes of nature and elements of fire, earth, air and water.
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Steele says that much of the work shown at Take It Easy is united in its sense of playfulness and humor and “a lot of work might fall under the category of craft.”
“Titanium” certainly hews to that description with its craft-inspired works and sense of experimental playfulness seen in artwork titles and execution.
Both Brown and Icecold have created works for “Titanium” that reference shrines, stretched animal skins and quilts, pieces that they inscribe with words or weave with found objects. In Brown’s alternative “Self Portrait,” an armature of galvanized steel stucco netting has been ornamented with locks of the artist’s hair, with glycerin, plumbers putty and a dried kombucha “scoby” that suggests flesh. At the base of the sculpture are casts of cornbread from Brown’s grandmother’s metal cornbread pans. The piece blends organic elements, some taken from the artist’s own body, with references to his plumbing vocation to create a sensory self-portrait.
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Open since October 2021 Take It Easy is Steele’s second Atlanta gallery following the shuttering of Camayuhs, her risk-taking contemporary art space located inside her former Peachtree Hills home. Take It Easy is a collaboration between Steele, an Atlanta native and MFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her co-directors Lindsey Stapleton and Corey Oberlander who co-founded the Providence, Rhode Island, gallery Grin before decamping to Atlanta.
“At some point, I just became more interested in other people’s art than my own,” says Steele of her decision to stop making art in order to support the vision of other artists.
Unable to attend “Titanium’s” installation and opening, Icecold left specific instructions for the assembly and execution of the works including “Jurassic Park,” a tiny campfire scene in glazed ceramic placed on the gallery floor. In keeping with the spiritual, organic feel of this show about both pragmatic earth and ethereal sky, Icecold, whose bio describes the artist as a “Black multidisciplinary craftsperson from planet Earth,” lists “linear time” and “magic” as some of the artwork’s media.
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
In this and other ways Take It Easy is very much a creative lab that defers to the artists who show there.
Brown, who arrives to help put finishing touches on “Jurassic Park” for Icecold, says the show came out of weekly dialogues between the artists on topics including the Black relationship to the outdoors and the spiritual qualities of nature.
The tiny roughly 350 square foot Take It Easy space feels like the perfect size to highlight work like this from emerging artists allowed to go their own way. In the room dubbed “Headspace” (aka, the bathroom), a short film “Being and Breathing” by Atlanta-based Logan Lynette Burroughs looks like a sensual, dreamy black-and-white love letter to Atlanta. Donald Glover-meets-Antonioni, the film unfolds in languorous slow motion featuring a baby splashing in a kiddie pool, a man dancing at an outdoor festival and two men popping wheelies on their motorcycles as they ride down a tree-lined street.
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Credit: Courtesy of Take It Easy
Like a few other smaller, newer art galleries — Day & Night Projects, Wolfgang Gallery and Hi-Lo Gallery — Take It Easy, says Steele, tends to focus on teaming local artists with national ones.
“So people in Atlanta can see something maybe that they haven’t seen before. Because some of the Atlanta artists get heavily circulated,” says Steele of the tendency for talented locals to pop up again and again in group shows.
“It creates an opportunity for artists in Atlanta to connect with artists outside the Southeast bubble.”
VISUAL ART REVIEW
“Titanium”
Through Feb. 25. Noon-4 p.m. Saturdays. Take It Easy, 546 Edgewood Ave. SE, takeiteasyatl.com.
Bottom line: Two artists and a filmmaker with a shared affinity for exploring identity and a lyrical, spiritual through line exemplify the risk-taking spirit of Take It Easy gallery.
