Wall Works is a new series where we invite an artist to create a site-specific wall installation in the Plaza Gallery. Katya Tepper's Hysteric Sign (Ribbed Tomato 'n Grapes) is a large scale, clunky wall sculpture that initially resembles the oversized road signs that loom over the American landscape. Like the architectural signs of strip malls and billboards, this sculpture claims and marks space as a frontal design, with bold colors and graphic shapes related to painting. Upon closer inspection, it reveals a dizzying and layered sculptural language defined by holes.

This exhibition highlights the work of undergraduate students at the Dodd working in all disciplines and throuhgout their four years of study. The exhibition is curated by Jamie Steele, artist and director of Camayhus, an artist run gallery in Atlanta. She is also a co-founder of GURL DONT BE DUMB, a Chicago-based collaborative and curatorial project. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her work she makes use of neon colors, drag aesthetic, and various feminine accoutrements that are often transformed into the grotesque.

In this exhibition, Dodd MFA candidate, Yana Bondar, explores patterns of self-sacrifice in feminine archetypes and their perpetuation of roles and identity as a kind of waiting, a form of purgatory or a gentle rot without beginning or end. In the creation of twofigures —The Girl with Short Hair: The Girl of Sacrificial Mind and The Girl with Long Hair: Girl of Sacrificial Body— Bondar examines concepts of a romanticized personhood through sacrifice, arguing the inability to form a sense of agency or vision of a possible future.

Through the works on display, created by a community of queer artists, Congeal explores the comfort and discomfort of living in a body. The thirteen artists in this exhibition abstract the corporeal, manipulating normative notions of what constitutes embodiment. Secretions, body dysmorphia, and various body fluids act as potent symbols of the blurring of outlines. While appropriating Dada and Surrealists techniques, the artists reject the misogyny and homophobia that is so often associated with these movements.

New York-based artists, Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall, collaborative projects are located in the gaps between history and story-telling, and draw from archival texts, sociological conventions, oral histories, postmodern theory and postcolonial studies, to examine power and privilege in the United States. The artists’ current work is inspired by the lost histories of Bengali sailors who, passing as Black in the early twentieth century, settled into communities of color in the wake of anti-Asian immigration laws in the United States.

Exhibition featuring the work of students graduating with a BFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art. 

Wall Works is a new program where we invite an artist to create a site-specific wall installation in the Plaza Gallery. Dodd alumna and Athens-based artist, Jess Machacek’s Endless Summer extends on her practice of using home improvement materials that mimic the natural world such as pool vinyl, plastic ponds, and Astroturf. In this work, the artificial and the real blur as a nostalgic summer landscape emerges. Paint is chosen for its descriptive titles—Beach House, Ocean Sigh, Summer Gold—and well-worn vacation aesthetics are abstracted in line and color.