On Thursday, August 9^th, Charlie Brouwer’s Now I Lay Me… opened at whitespace gallery.  Wouldn’t It Be Grand?, Brouwer’s over-sized grand piano installation, greeted visitors as they made their way up the gravel driveway as one of the focal points of the evening.  Equally impressive was the 14-foot tall installation of ladders ascending up into the skylights of the first room of the gallery. The piece entitled Now I Lay Me… is composed of 30 orchard ladders that cradle a resting figure.  Frank Levering, owner of a 100-year-old family orchard in Arat, VA, donated the antique ladders to Charlie Brouwer for use in temporary exhibitions.  As a result, Charlie gives new life and meaning to these artifacts. Continue reading →

On August 2nd, Dr. Jerry Cullum gave a curator’s talk for the exhibition “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” which showed at whitespace from July 6 – August 5, 2012.  In this exhibition, Dr. Jerry Cullum carefully connected the works of twenty-two international and local artists exploring the ways in which cognitive sciences drive the discussion about the nature of investigation in the sciences and humanities and the resulting impact on artists. One of the artists included in the exhibition was Atlanta-based artist, Julie Sims, who has composed this short essay on her experience of “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again.”

♦ Check out this video of the Curator’s talk and images of the exhibition for reference provided by Julie Sims

A Rainbow Unwoven: The End is the Beginning

I arrived at Whitespace in a torrential downpour bracketed by an amazing double rainbow. It filled the sky in the east, and coming down Edgewood Avenue it appeared to spring directly from the gallery itself. Despite a general lack of superstitious belief, it was difficult not to regard this as a portent relevant to the curator talk for From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again that was taking place within. Could there be a more symbolically appropriate coincidence? And was the fact that I was unable to help myself from interpreting it as such not also both appropriate and ironic? Continue reading →

Opening reception:  Thursday, August 9, 2012 | 7 – 10 pm

August 9 – September 1, 2012

Charlie Brouwer, "Now I Lay Me...", white-washed orchard ladders, dimensions vary

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

-Child’s prayer that first appeared in 1737 in

The New England Primer, America’s first school textbook.

Join us on Thursday, August 9 for the opening reception of Now I Lay Me…, artist Charlie Brouwer’s first exhibition with whitespace gallery. Brouwer is returning to Atlanta after organizing the very sucessful “Rise Up Atlanta” event last year with Flux Projects. Referencing this project that incorporated a series of stacked ladders borrowed from individuals and organizations around the city, Brouwer has once again created a ladder-based installation for whitespace gallery. The piece includes approximately twenty white-stained, old orchard ladders rising towards the ceiling with a life-size, reclining wooden figure suspended among them six feet in the air. Reminding him of the old children’s prayer, “Now I Lay Me,” he also constructed a dream-like over-sized grand piano that has seemingly serenaded the reclining figure into a deep sleep after his or her bedtime prayer.

The drawings act as an extension of his life – explorations of his past, present, and future. He makes art, so he can discover where he has been, what he thinks of the present and where he sees himself going. Pulling from meditations on prayer and the human soul, childhood memories and scenes from Atlanta, Brouwer’s work helps him make his way from past to present.

There was a fantastic turnout for Dr. Jerry Cullum’s curator talk at whitespace on Thursday.  Over 50 visitors spanning the worlds of art, science and everything in-between braved the torrential downpour for his presentation on From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again.  With his signature mix of scholarly analysis and humor, Jerry took us on a journey discussing the interconnections of the show.  Starting with Karley Sullivan’s 160 Moons and continuing on a thematic journey through the other works in the gallery and adjoining spaces, Jerry explained their placement in the show and shared thoughtful anecdotes for each work.  Continue reading →

My sense is that everything Freud and Jung believed and perceived is true, but true as viewed through two sets of incompatible distorting filters inherited from segments of nineteenth-century European culture, a factor that neither of them took sufficiently into account. (Both men felt that further biological research would eventually bear out their largely intuitive findings.)

Likewise the perceptions and speculations of neurology are true, but are viewed through yet another set of distorting cultural filters. We believe these cultural filters are the very structure of reality itself, because we live inside them and can’t see them until we learn to see them—and maybe not even then.

An interesting experiment reported in the Sunday, July 8 New York Times involved showing doctors sets of data on patients, with some of them shown a photograph of the patient as white, and others shown the same patient as black. The course of treatment the doctors prescribed turned out to be tinged by racial presuppositions even though the doctors believed they had no racial biases.

The key to the experiment is that the doctors who realized that this was probably a test about racial attitudes prescribed courses of treatment that showed no deviation according to race. (It would be interesting to see if the same results would obtain for gender, socioeconomic status, physical attractiveness, and other variables, but given the number of doctors who read the New York Times and the journal in which the results of the experiment were published, the possibility of conducting these further experiments has pretty well been eliminated.)

The conclusion of the experimenters, and it may be an overly simple one, was that a moment of self-aware reflection could correct for unconscious presuppositions that influence seemingly unrelated decision-making. This is a way of overcoming the tendency to jump to conclusions that has been hard-wired into us by—evolution? By something or other, anyway. We might stop for a moment and think about how we construct probable models, and why we build them the way we do….

To what extent do we have to take account of how we are hard-wired, and how our ways of sitting over coffee or just-sitting-when-sitting might influence the outcomes of our inferences, whether we are drawing conclusions about particle physics or macroeconomic theory or art exhibitions? Can we really rely exclusively on “rational” methods to filter out or correct for responses that are almost entirely not under our conscious control because they are not even part of our conscious awareness, much less our control?

Just asking.

“From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” explores why human beings are so seldom able to comprehend the full dimensions of complex systems—systems from cosmology to chemical evolution, to the politics of ethnic difference, to the consequences for the world’s waters of everything from contemporary mining practices to large-scale climate change; we not only do not understand such systems, we are unconscious of the effects of our newest technologies on how we perceive and think, and thus this also is a subject explored by the exhibition.

Neurology and the cognitive sciences have given us insight into the biology of barriers to comprehension, but the biology has to be understood in the context of individual psychology and the impact of our culture on that psychology. This is in itself a complex system that has its own set of barriers to understanding.

Rather than being didactic, the exhibition works by indirection on the viewer’s unconscious perceptions, aiming to make an impact through intriguing, seductively lush visual imagery meant to lead the viewer to learn more.

For more thoughts on this exhibition, check out the Creative Loafing article by Grace Thornton. “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” runs through August 4th with a curator conversation on August 2nd at whitespace.

Whitespace artist, Sally Heller, has been an inspiration to the Pre-K Young Explorers class at Granville Studio of Visual Arts in Ohio. GSVA is a non-profit organization collaborating with top artists and designers in building minds and cultivating innovation by bringing breakthrough creative education experiences to Central Ohio serving students of all ages from preschoolers to senior citizens. Rachael Moore, who assisted Sally in building an installation in Ohio, is GSVA’s Arts Integration Project Coordinator. Rachael had her pre-schoolers, the GSVA Young Explorers, construct an installation made with new and recycled materials to create “a contemporary forest of sorts” much like the artificial landscapes Heller is known for. This project is part of the series theme “From the Ground Up” in which the students create “experimental, temporary artworks in nature [including a vegetable and herb garden!] then persevered them through photography produced with digital SLR cameras.” The show will be on display through August at the GSVA Eddie Wolfe Gallery.

Below is an excerpt written by Rachael to Sally Heller explaining how the students were inspired by her work:

“On the last day of class (they come for 2 hours once a week for 9 weeks), the preschoolers were asked if they remembered the name of the lady who our art is inspired by and a 4 year old was impressively quick to call out your first and last name, in which started a “Sally Heller” chant where 12 preschoolers screamed your name at the top of their lungs repetitively for like 7 minutes straight inside the GSVA Eddie Wolfe Gallery where we were in process of installing the show together.  It was crazy out of control, wish you could have been there to experience it.”

Continue reading →