With the acrid yellow smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketing Atlanta last week, it seems as good a time as any to consider environmental destruction and its daily toll.
Atlanta artist Charlie Watts has certainly been charting what the loss of our natural world can look like.
Her solo show at Whitespace Gallery, “Entangled” meditates on the fate of the forest the Muscogee Creek nation called Weelaunee, a name resurrected by training center protesters. At over 300 acres, the forest is one of the city’s largest remaining green spaces. And an 85-acre portion of the forest is set to be bulldozed to make way for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Critics have dubbed the project “Cop City” and the battle for the future of the green space has been fraught, divisive and has resulted in the death of one protestor Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, shot and killed by police, though authorities say they were fired upon first. Others have been jailed as domestic terrorists for protesting the construction.
Watts’ is a simple proposition. She has photographed friends and herself in this chlorophyll-drenched green space. Like forest nymphs soaking in its ponds, her subjects wear shrouds of lichen and hornet nest corsages, at one with nature. Two large 96x120 inch prints on silk use that material to emphasize the ethereality and fragility of this otherworldly forest setting, through which Watts offers a suggestive portal to Weelaunee.
Credit: Charlie Watts
Credit: Charlie Watts
Though some might write off these lovely nude people reclining in a verdant forest as tree huggers and find the whole affair a little woo-woo, it’s just as possible to drop your defenses and surrender to the spirit of what Watts is doing. She’s rendering a primal communion between human beings and nature that many of us have undoubtedly lost. “Entangled” is an unnerving, even tragic proposition — a lament for another slice of paradise ground under the wheels of progress.
Credit: Charlie Watts
Credit: Charlie Watts
One of the most striking images in “Entangled” is “Gracie in Weelaunee,” of a gamine young woman with dark, blue-tinted hair whose face can be seen peeking out from a grove of lilies. Though many proponents of the future training center view the site as a desolate, overgrown wasteland, Watts sees things differently. She sees ancient trees, lush groves of plants and meadows of ferns and moss. Her images of this verdant place in the midst of the city speak to the magic of so much rich, complex nature coexisting beside a modern metropolis.
The men and women in Watts’ photographs mimic the posture of the nudes in oil paintings like Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’herbe” and John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.” But Watts’ is a modern spin; her subjects are an intentionally diverse group who act out familiar gestures. In “Judah in Weelaunee” it is a Black man who floats in a brackish pond, his palms turned heavenward like Shakespeare’s heroine.
In addition to her photographs, Watts has brought segments of bark and portions of tree trunks into the gallery space. One of the tree trunks is pitted and grooved and looks as if patterns have been carved into its surface. In fact, it’s just time’s passage that marks the trees like wrinkles and give these totems an unsettling, mystical presence. The artist brings nature to you, making it somehow register as more tragic and monumental when taken out of context. Will human beings one day have to visit natural history museums to see fragments of a world that has disappeared? Considering the rate of destruction, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
ART REVIEW
“Entangled”
Through Aug. 5. Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Whitespace Gallery, 814 Edgewood Ave., Atlanta. 404-688-1892, whitespace814.com.
Bottom line: In stunning shades of green and with a sense of heartbreak, photographer Charlie Watts imagines a world where humankind and nature might coexist.
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