In conjunction with 2014’s Slingshot festival of music, electronic art and technology, the Georgia Museum of Art will open exhibitions devoted to works by Tristan Perich and Quayola on March 20, with a free reception from 6-9 p.m. that evening.
Perich is a contemporary artist and composer based in New York City who works in electronic sound art and other media. Wire Magazine describes his musical compositions, recently included in the exhibition Soundings at the Museum of Modern Art, as “an austere meeting of electronic and organic.” The museum will feature one of his machine drawings on a 60-foot wall on the museum’s Patsy Dudley Pate Balcony through Sept. 21. The drawing will create itself over the course of its six-month installation, operating according to Perich’s code. Instead of being preprogrammed, however, the interaction of the digital and physical elements makes the work unique, introducing randomness into a tightly controlled order.
Quayola is a visual artist based in London who works in photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances. Strata #4, which will be screened in the museum’s Alonzo and Vallye Dudley Gallery through June 20, is a multichannel video installation commissioned by the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille. Quayola’s work focuses on a series of iconic Flemish pieces, focusing specifically on Rubens’ and Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces. The video installation results from a study of the paintings and the rules that govern the composition, color schemes and proportions of each work. It examines the collisions between classical figuration and contemporary abstraction.
Lynn Boland, a curator at the museum with an interest in contemporary art, experimental music and science and technology in the arts, is organizing both exhibitions.
“Slingshot offered the perfect chance to realize longstanding desires to work with both of these artists and the excitement and momentum to make it happen quickly,” Boland said. “Athens is lucky to have this festival, and I think these two installations will be among the most popular the museum has shown. Both are proof that, in the hands of an artist, code and geometry can make something powerful, thoughtful and beautiful.”
March 20 also falls on Third Thursday, an event devoted to art in the evening hours at six of Athens’ established venues for visual art: the Georgia Museum of Art, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Lyndon House Arts Center, Glass Cube & Gallery@Hotel Indigo-Athens, Ciné and ATHICA. The Lamar Dodd School of Art will also open an exhibition by Kota Ezawa, Lamar Dodd Visiting Professorial Chair of Art, that evening, with a reception.
This is the second year for Slingshot, which takes place in downtown Athens March 19-22. Spread over four city blocks and dozens of venues, the festival spotlights international, national and local acts on stage, with boundary-pushing artworks throughout the urban environment and a tech conference involving leading innovators.
