It’s a metropolitan quandary: to live in an interesting, exciting city, you need growth and change.
But with that growth can come some devastating, unwanted effects: the destruction of nature; unchecked, unattractive building; congestion; the feeling that a city’s character and charm vanishes with wildfire development.
Longtime Atlanta artist Constance Thalken, a retired professor emerita at Georgia State University, offers a personal take on the darker side of development in her solo show at Whitespace Gallery. The show is two pronged, divided into the main exhibition “Exit Wounds” centered on the violent upheaval of Thalken’s Decatur neighborhood and peace of mind that came with a developer razing the 5-acre lot next to her home.
And in the smaller, mildly creepy Whitespec cellar space close to the main Whitespace gallery, Thalken’s work continues in “Between Worlds” where she photographs a hornet’s nest with the kind of granular detail that suggests a scientist studying a specimen under a microscope.
Thalken is quite effective in using her images to drive home the inherent violence that attends the kind of development project we see every day in Atlanta: the removal of trees, the tilling of earth, the corralling of decimated earth with those obnoxious hunter orange plastic fences.
One of the first images you encounter, “Exit Wound #1,″ is visceral in an unexpected way. A tree has been cut in the midst of a construction zone, leaving a small, sad projection of wood in its center, like a fractured bone sticking out of broken skin. A still-intact nearby tree seems somehow implicated in the devastation: a witness who might be next. That orange plastic barrier fencing winds its way around the scene like police crime tape.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Thalken contrasts the intense colors of green leaves and vines, gooey Georgia soil and mottled tree bark with a number of smaller photographs surrounding that main image. In those more delicate, monochromatic images she records a variety of barely perceptible animal tracks imprinted on the soil. Birds and snakes, opossums and raccoon prints indicate an entire world beyond human perception or appreciation that the aggressive upheaval disrupts. Fallen trees are business as usual in a city as leafy as Atlanta, but Thalken manages to create a real sense of loss in the way she frames another tree in “Exit Wounds #2″ with its roots splayed in the air like innards or a helpless animal gone belly up.
Though commentary on human encroachment into nature is central to “Exit Wounds” there are plenty of moments when Thalken becomes enraptured by formal elements within her frame: the striations of deep iron red and gunmetal gray in bulldozed soil, churned up into rising and falling mounds like a stormy sea. At such moments some of Thalken’s ideas about environmental destruction recede and the work can feel less compelling.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
That interplay between human destruction and a fragile natural world culminates in a short video that plays like Thoreau-meets-“Koyaanisqatsi.” A riot of chlorophyll in a gorgeous lush garden and the sound of bird song establishes a blissed-out status quo. Then the slow dawning nightmare begins: bleating bulldozers, the snarl of heavy equipment, men’s voices, chaos, swaths of safety fencing and ugliness drowning out all of that beauty. It’s hard not to feel Thalken’s pain and understand the trauma of your home being invaded with chaos, sound, dirt, your peaceful refuge and slice of paradise suddenly upended.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
If “Exit Wounds” is all about destruction, then Thalken’s “Between Worlds” is about the marvel of creation. This ancillary show offers tabletop studies of a bald-faced hornet’s nest analyzed by Thalken’s camera. The hornet’s nest’s strange papery surface is rendered almost alien beneath her lens. She is clearly rapt before this piece of natural architecture explaining its construction as “23 percent plant material and 77 percent hornet saliva.” The problem is, the idea behind the work is far more interesting than the work itself which tends to bleed, one into the other. Yes, nature is a miraculous thing, but it’s hard to see it in this particular retelling.
ART REVIEW
“Exit Wounds” and “Between Worlds”
Through March 12. Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Whitespace Gallery, 814 Edgewood Ave., Atlanta. 404-688-1892, whitespace814.com.
Bottom line: An often tender and unsettling, and occasionally unsatisfying, examination of how urban development can encroach on the sanctity of both the natural and human worlds.
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