For 18 years, the Art Papers Art Auction has asked artists from Atlanta and beyond to contribute works of art to support the mission (and about 25 percent of their annual operating budget) of the Atlanta-based quarterly art magazine. This year, 250 artists have donated artworks, with so many offering up their work that Art Papers executive director Saskia Benjamin says some had to be turned away "because of space constraints" at Saturday's event.
For the first time, the annual auction will be held at a 20,000-square-foot-space in the buzzy Ponce City Market.
Very much a see-and-be-seen event, “the people watching is amazing,” admits Benjamin, the Art Papers Art Auction is also a chance to mingle with artists and art lovers. “There are established artists participating whose work can be found in major museum collections. We also have young talent working hard in grad school, and artists who are considered emerging on the scene,” Benjamin says.
Want to know some of my favorites at this year’s auction? With this many artists and works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography and works on paper, hard choices abound, but this is a wonderful opportunity to bring a little bit of the city’s impressive art scene into your living room.
Ridley Howard, ‘Drawing for Summer Party’
I love the vaporous, ephemeral quality of this drawing by Howard of a woman decked out in her summer staples of sundress and the sunglasses that purposefully confound our full understanding from view. In the tradition of Alex Katz and Julian Opie, Howard’s drawings and paintings often depict a sophisticated, urban set represented in a stark, almost graphic novel style with clean backgrounds and flat swaths of color. A University of Georgia and School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston grad, Howard has shown extensively nationally and internationally and in his hometown. His tiny portraits feel, to me, like fascinating stills from some larger drama; a film by Yorgos Lanthimos or a novel by Tom Perrotta, pregnant with potential and backstory.
Andrew Pope, ‘Lighter by Patience’
Pope is an Atlanta native who's now New York-based. His work "Lighter by Patience" (2015) is a beguiling mixed media painting that looks to me like a self-referential musing on the artgoing experience itself. A sense of emotional distance and alienation defines many of Pope's works and certainly clings to Pope's auction offering. The slightly miffed man in the painting's corner looks like I often feel visiting museums and trying to gauge how soon the slow-shuffle of my fellow audience members will allow me my turn at bat. An up-and-comer who has exhibited in several New York galleries, Pope recently collaborated with internationally renowned artist Raymond Pettibon on a zine currently featured as part of the Pettibon retrospective "A Pen of All Work" on view through April at NYC's New Museum.
Christian Bradley West, ‘Anonymous Is Not My Name, Isaiah’
The art scene in Atlanta can often feel lacking when it comes to social issues and political causes, as if the polite Southern mindset prevails, keeping feathers from being ruffled. I’ve detected a change of course more recently, a desire to engage and confront often painful truths. To that end, West has uncovered a disturbing incident in race relations: a Florida police department that used mug shots of African-Americans for target practice. Salvaging these people from dehumanization, West instead performs an act of resuscitation. He mends the bullet holes in his phototransfer with gold in keeping with the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi, in which imperfections, like the crack in a piece of pottery, become signs of uniqueness and value. “Sealing them back together with gold represents the act of healing,” says West, “but there’s always a scar.”
Jody Fausett, ‘Garden Hose’
A personal favorite among a crop of talented longtime regional artists, Atlantan Fausett has created numerous bodies of work centered around his North Georgia family’s identities, homes and pursuits. Fausett’s relatives often pose in his strange sci-fi-meets-suburbia images, and they lend him their taxidermy for his compelling meditations on stillness and vulnerability. “Garden Hose” takes a favorite Fausett trope — the innocent, exposed deer — and entwines it in a kind of domestic snare: the garden hose. Fausett’s eerie photographs operate as canny commentaries on the human-made and the natural world, and the sinister, threatening forces from which his creatures shrink.
Andrea Wallace, ‘La Rivière’
As the mother of a son, I have a soft spot for work that highlights the complexity, sensitivity and stereotype-busting dimensions of masculinity. Masculine norms are so ingrained, we barely notice them, but Wallace's image "La Rivière" speaks to me about the uncharted depths of masculinity. The two boys in her image look like two sides of a coin, one almost caving in on himself with self-consciousness, the other far more confident and brash. I love the amount of visual information Wallace captures of these children's personalities in her photograph and the gorgeous clash of greens and the boys' shocks of red hair that make the image pulsate with life. A filmmaker and photographer, Wallace is also the artistic director of photography and new media at Colorado's Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
EVENT PREVIEW
18th Art Papers Art Auction
Feb. 25: VIP preview, 6-8 p.m.; general admission, 8-11 p.m. Ponce City Market, The Boiler Room (Second Floor), 675 Ponce de Leon Ave. N.E., Atlanta. $50 in advance and $75 at the door for general admission. Buy tickets and review works online at www.501auctions.com/artpapers. New this year: Pre-bidding begins online Feb. 24.
