Those Gentle Waves of Pay Dirt: Machacek and Enos

Illges Gallery
Corn Center for the Visual Arts
921 Front Avenue
Columbus, GA

Those Gentle Waves of Pay Dirt, by Alumnus Jess Machacek and Assistant Professor James A. Enos, is the culmination of an artist research project supported by The Columbus State University Visiting Artist + Scholars Residency Program.

Currently on view at the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, Illges Gallery, the exhibition is comprised of sculptural works that position material futures against extractivist practices and urban redevelopment strategies across the Southeastern United States.

Machacek and Enos’ project is interested in a set of conditions laid bare by the contouring of Columbus’s (GA) urban whitewater course and notorious Wave Shaper, as well as the evolution of comparable sites of preservation, leisure, and decline at Oxbow Meadows, Providence Canyon, and Callaway Gardens. Accordingly, their research explores an urgency surrounding tourism, redevelopment, and revitalization to show how material flows transmit hidden values via expressions of leisure and architecture.

Those Gentle Waves of Pay Dirt has been supported by the CSU Department of Arts’ VASRP, CSU Friends of Art, The Mildred Miller Fort Foundation, and CSU Student Activities Fund.

James A. Enos engages the built environment through architecture and social practice in an effort to understand how public culture responds to change. Jess Machacek produces domestic objects and installations that propose notions of nature as constructed or shaped by processes of irony and familiarity. Their collaborative work approaches ideas of scale, modularity, and pattern in reference to artifacts, monuments, and spaces blurred by time.