Carnival of Sorts presents Life on Mars, a one night only group art exhibition on April 21st at Southern Brewing Company. Life on Mars is free to attend with no entry fee. 

Featuring the work of 19 junior and senior undergraduate students of Lamar Dodd School of Art, Life on Mars will include an eclectic, self curated mix of work from student artists of varying disciplines, including drawings, paintings, textiles, and mixed media. Each student artist explores different themes, narratives, and mediums in their own art, so the collection of work is reflective of the unique mixture of artists composing the group.

Life on Mars will feature work from a variety of group members, like Amy Strand, who creates colorful abstracts engaging in the “freedom of impulsive gesture” while offering notions of playfulness, memory, and kinship. Group member Peyton Bailey creates shockingly vibrant paintings exploring abstraction through landscape, botanicals, and the natural world, making depictions driven by light, material, and the experience of painting. Alan Shorey’s gestural work focuses on material experimentation-for example, his eco prints, made from transferring plant material onto watercolor paper. 

The complete group of artists includes:

Catie Cook- @catie_cook_art
Philip Hamrick- @pmh.art
Jack Rose- @jackrose.studio
Sarah Moon-@moonart.co
Peyton Bailey- @peytonbaileyart
Natalia Kacharava- @na_tuta
Alan Shorey- @apshoreyart
Sarah Landmesser- @sarahlandmesser
Maeve Munson- @mmunson_art
Erin Faircloth-@erin_faircloth
Alondra Arevalo- @alondraarevalo.art
Graeme Schneider- @graeme.schneider
Karli Ehl-@karliehlstudio
Amy Strand- @amychristina.art
James Kim- @james.website
Sangbin Lee- @idbin0601
Anna Giles Truax- @a.giles.art
Michael McDevitt- @jmmcdevittart
Tien Tran- @tinartchives

The official instagram account for the group: @carnival_of_sorts

Carnival of Sorts is proud to present Life on Mars at Southern Brewing Company on April 21st from 7pm-11pm. 

Carnival of Sorts is a group of artists from Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Formed in fall of 2021 with the intent of “making opportunity happen rather than waiting for it”, the group banded together and first exhibited at their self-titled group show, Carnival of Sorts, at the 40-Watt Club in December of 2021. With such a positive response from the first show, the group was eager to return again to the public scene with another pop up exhibit in the following spring. The name Carnival of Sorts, coined from a song by Athens native band R.E.M., embodied the rag tag group of artists seeking to create a space for themselves. In the spirit of tradition, the second annual exhibit title, Life on Mars, is taken from the iconic David Bowie song.

When asked about the formation and “why” behind the group, member Catie Cook said “I would call Carnival of Sorts a collective. We kind of fell into a group because we worked so closely together at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. When student Phillip Hamrick first approached me about putting on a group show, I knew that this could be something really special. We were all friends in the studio feeding off of our collective energy and inspiration, so it was quite natural for us to work as a team to funnel that into an exhibition. We hope that our show can function in the already existing narrative of alternative curatorial spaces. Though so far removed from the happenings of the 1970’s, our show exists because of the work of those revolutionary artists. Art school is often very institutionalized and we wanted to create a space for exhibiting art that existed outside the confines of the traditional academic or “White Cube”. Catie Cook is a painter focused on depictions of materialism, hyperfemininity, and the body as a vessel for emotion, and she will be exhibiting new pieces at the show.