Author Archives: gallerymanager

Through Her Eyes by Rhonda Mullen

Through her eyes

By Rhonda Mullen

Walking through the exhibit, Hortophilia, at Whitespace Gallery, is like meandering through the woods and stumbling on the unexpected. A woman floats in a shallow stream, eyes looking through you, the mark of a circular tattoo showing through her paper-thin sheath. A clump of roots drips from the ceiling, grasped by two crystallized hands. At the light-infused grotto floating with lavender water lilies, is it your imagination or does a fairy dance at the darkening edge? Further into the show, two women embrace in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, looking up to muse on why you, the viewer, are here.

These images tap into something primeval and wise, visceral and ethereal, fierce and tender. You exist outside the frame, a voyeur. But as you immerse yourself, you become an extension of the setting. You can smell the fecund earth under the velvety moss, under the sturdy trunk, under the swaying leaves of the giving tree.

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks defined hortophilia as the desire to interact with, manage, and tend to nature. “The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological,” Sacks wrote in his essay collection, “Everything in its Place.”

Photographer Charlie Watts presents a visual interpretation of hortophilia through photography that taps into the spiritual, emotional, physical, and neurological. These photos combine a ripe beauty full of light and tinged with darkness. A quality of otherworldliness murmurs throughout this work, which the artist explicitly describes as “a stepping stone to the unknown realm just past the peripheral edge of consciousness.”

Like previous subjects Watts has taken on, Hortophilia continues her exploration of the interconnectedness in female relationships and a physical connection to the planet. In her previous show, The Throwaways, Watts presented visual allegories of the sex trafficking industry in photo-collage lightboxes, calling attention to the desecration of the trafficked women and the destructive environment in which they were forced to exist. In Just Beyond the Peripheral, Watts focused her lens on women in natural settings that one reviewer described as “lyrically realistic but vaguely disquieting.” Her series, Honey or Tar, honed in on the collapse of honeybee colonies through representations of women—bound in mossy ropes or wearing only a beekeeper’s hat and veil—as totems to protect the bees. In Hortophilia, Watts extends her newest invitation to meditate on the earth and our connection to it.

As an editor, I am the person Charlie Watts sometimes reaches out to when she’s searching for the right words to articulate her vision. As an art collector, I am lucky to have many of her photographs, paintings, and sculptures throughout my home. And as Charlie’s mother, I have witnessed her visual intuition from her earliest years. Minutes after she was born, her face just inches from mine, I said, “Hey, baby,” and her big, deep pools of eyes popped open. I swam into them, and these thirty years later, I am swimming still. Charlie Watts continues to help me “see” the bigger picture.

Just days before this installation of Hortophilia at Whitespace, I watched my artist daughter assemble the prints in frames. One would need to be reprinted, she decided. The color was slightly off. She wondered aloud about where to place the images in the gallery to invoke the most powerful effect. She hoped the tree roots carefully excised from a North Carolina mountainside would add to and not distract from the works on paper. At the opening, I watched a group that clustered around one of her photographs, mesmerized by the young woman who lay face up with eyes closed in a dry creek bed. Above, other women scampered up a leafy hillside, their backs to the camera. The viewers were silent as they studied the photograph, having no need for words as they momentarily saw through the eyes of Charlie Watts. They had just followed the artist into an unknown realm just past the peripheral of consciousness.

 

Black Cloud Prism | Zipporah Camille Thompson

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Zipporah Camille Thompson: Black Cloud Prism

October 2,2018
artpapers.org
By Dinah McClintock

Zipporah Camille Thompson’s Black Cloud Prism [September 7–October 20, 2018] at Whitespace in Atlanta fuses millennial tech-savvy with ancient cultural practices to invest mundane materials with “sympathetic magic,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “magic based on the assumption that a person or thing can be supernaturally affected through its name or an object representing it.”

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Installation image of Black Cloud Prism by Zipporah Camille Thompson

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Review: Zipporah Camille Thompson and Mary Stuart Hall explore memory and identity at whitespace

September 18,2018
ArtsAtl.com
By Muriel Vega

When Zipporah Camille Thompson last showed at Whitespace in 2016 with Dark of the Moon, her work evoked an air of mystery and the unknown. The use of soft textiles contrasting against black paint evoked a sense of darkness, as if mirroring the undiscovered, dark corners of the universe. With her new show, Black Cloud Prism at Whitespace through October 20, the darkness has started to dissipate. Thompson’s work seems to have undergone a metamorphosis as she merges her customary techniques into more cohesive pieces, balancing the former use of objects and textiles with new, lighter hues and photographs.

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Zipporah Camille Thompson, Summoning the Storm, 2018

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The Creatives | Ruth Dusseault

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Audio Q&A: Ruth Dusseault documents off-grid millennials in “The Creatives”

August 2,2018
ArtsAtl.com
By Amy Kiley

Atlanta-based photographer and filmmaker Ruth Dusseault has traveled throughout North America documenting young people who live in communal groups outside societal structures and norms. She brings her findings to the public in a collection of photographs, shorts films and other media that reflect her background as both an artist and a journalist.

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Ruth Dusseault, Adam and Eve, North Carolina, 2015 (30

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Review: Modern hippie movement the focus of Atlanta photographer’s show

August 7,2018
AJC.com
By Felicia Feaster

Atlanta-based artist Ruth Dusseault has spent the past several years documenting some current strains of the counterculture across the country, and people united by their desire to drop out of mainstream life.

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“Adam and Eve, Skill Sharing Festival, North Carolina” is featured in Atlanta artist Ruth Dusseault’s solo exhibition “The Creatives” at Inman Park’s Whitespace Gallery. CONTRIBUTED BY WHITESPACE GALLERY Photo: For the AJC
Review: Modern hippie movement the focus of Atlanta photographer’s show

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WE RIDE THE MARTA BUS | Ruth Dusseault

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WE RIDE THE MARTA BUS

July 25,2018
ArtPapers.org

WE RIDE THE MARTA BUS is a 30 minute nonlinear film, and the moving image component of an ART PAPERS commission that first appeared in the July/August 2016 print issue. The film fans across the Metro Atlanta map into six vignettes that can be viewed in any order, and each one visits a different bus line.

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Ruth Dusseault, Adam and Eve, North Carolina, 2015 (30

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Short Shorts 2018 – CALL FOR ARTISTS

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Short Shorts 2018 – CALL FOR ARTISTS

Deadline: July 22,2018
Submit on FilmFreeway.com or festhome.com
Curated by Didi Dunphy
View more Didi Dunphy

“We seek short films and video works (no more than 5 minutes) from authors/artists that explore and challenge ideas presented in this prompt, an investigation at revealing what is hidden, unraveling the distraction designed to confuse, un-muddying the smoke and mirrors.
We encourage submissions from a plurality of viewpoints, methods and forms, from artists, documentarians, students, citizens and amateurs alike.”

Submit

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Short Shorts 2018 - CALL FOR ARTISTS

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Event: Art Over Dinner ft. Didi Dunphy with Whitespace Gallery

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Art Over Dinner ft. Didi Dunphy with Whitespace Gallery

July 29,2018
Art Farm at Serenbe
Hosted by Art Farm at Serenbe
View more Didi Dunphy

Art Over Dinner is a series of intimate gatherings with artists and the organizations that support their work. We collaborate with the chefs at HomespunATL and local farmers to bring a seasonal meal that showcases winemakers and brewers, and invite our guest artists to spark the conversation at one long farm table on the outdoor deck of The Art Farm at Serenbe.

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Art Over Dinner ft. Didi Dunphy with Whitespace Gallery

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Won’t Lovers Revolt Now | Curated by THE FUEL AND LUMBER COMPANY in partnership with AIR Serenbe

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Review: “Won’t Lovers Revolt Now” at Whitespace offers timely but uneven critique of Trump-era nationalism

July 11,2018
ArtsAtl.com
By Logan Lockner

The tense days leading up to the opening of Won’t Lovers Revolt Now at Whitespace on June 22 seemed to amplify the urgency of the question in the group exhibition’s title. Curated by The Fuel and Lumber Company, the Birmingham-based curatorial project of artist couple Amy Pleasant and Pete Schulte, the show would have still offered potent critiques of nationalism and closed borders even if its opening hadn’t followed on the heels of two weeks of disturbing headlines describing migrant children being forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.

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Las Hermanas Iglesias, WON’T LOVERS REVOLT NOW

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