The 11th annual exhibition of the work of emerging artists explores elements of domesticity, materiality, and collaboration by weaving five artists together across disciplines of textile, print, metal, sound, and sculpture in a site-specific installation. Megan Burchett, Maddie Zerkel, Jonathan Quinn Nowell, Forest Kelley, and Alexis Spina play off one another’s practices in the context of the given space to create connections and explore elements of scale, materiality, and domestic forms. The exhibition will be on view starting Friday, April 6  and closing May 13, with an opening reception on April 6 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

The curators, Kira Hegeman and Jon Vogt, are visual artists and art educators in Athens, Georgia. Hegeman is currently completing a Ph.D. in Art Education at UGA, in which she is exploring material culture, consumption, and interaction through participatory, public art installations. Jon Vogt teaches in foundations and printmaking at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Both Hegeman and Vogt have contributed to ATHICA in many ways, respectively as former and current board members, as committee chairs, as volunteers, and as exhibiting artists.

The Emerges artists bring disparate practices to their collaboration: former Athenians and UGA students Megan Burchett and Maddie Zerkel have an established collaborative practice through which they have explored the intersection of textile and paper arts. Burchett incorporates printmaking, papermaking, bookbinding and textile processes into her practice. She has a BFA in printmaking from Cornell, has worked in several print shops on the east coast, and received her MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from UGA. Zerkel, a native Athenian, incorporates printmaking, dyeing, and weaving into her practice, and has BFA in Textile Design from UGA. Jonathan Quinn Nowell, a self-described river poet, has a BFA from Mississippi State University and is a recent MFA graduate from UGA. He describes his work in the exhibition as “microwaves / shear force / the divining rod / magnetic breath.”

Forest Kelley received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Social Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently the Photography Fellow at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the UGA. With a practice that ranges from subjective documentary photography to installations based on video and repurposed web code, Kelley’s work considers the friction between subjectivity and culture—how personal psychology lives within a social ecology. Disparate and dispersed devices comprise a sonic experience that mimics a soundscape ecology (biophony). Kelley thinks of this collection of devices not strictly as a collection of media works but as independent zoomorphic beings communicating through individual signaling languages.

Alexis Spina works primarily in small-scale metal sculpture and installation. Her work is constructed through an extensive body of research rooted in governmental injustices, global politics, and the objective of truth in the age of disinformation. Spina obtained her BFA in metalsmithing from the University of Edinboro and is currently an MFA candidate at UGA.