ABOUT BETHANY

Bethany Collins, originally from Montgomery, Alabama, is a multimedia Atlanta based artist. Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the Southeast including From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again at Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA; Southern Art at the Welch Gallery; Pre-Emergent at Aqua Art in Miami, FL; and Pulp at Beta Pictoris Galley in Birmingham, AL. Prior to returning to the Southeast to pursue her MFA from Georgia State University, Collins was the Public Art Coordinator for Working Classroom, a contemporary arts organization in Albuquerque, NM.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in the unnerving possibility of multiple meanings, dual perceptions, and limitlessness in the seemingly binary. Drawing repeatedly allows me to fully understand objects in space, while defining and redefining my own racial landscape.

For me, racial identity has neither been instantly formed nor conjured in isolation. Rather, identity entangles memory: actual and revisited, cultural and historical, individual and collective. Through the dissolution of dichotomies and exploration of language, this work recalls moments in the formation of my racial identity as Black and Biracial. And each re-worked mark is yet another attempt to navigate the binary paradigm of race in the American South by grasping invisible limitations and grounding myself within the collective African American visual narrative.

White Noise, my language-based series, begins with unsettling statements or probing questions and eventually ends with equally unsettled compositions of chalk on chalkboard. Through a slow and tediously deconstructive process, the resulting textual forms resemble the destructive path of a bomb, a cloud of hovering chalk dust, an astrological occurrence, or possibly a field of white noise.

As with my entire body of work, White Noise continues to evoke a longing for what author Rebecca Walker refers to in her autobiography as “a memory that can remind me at all times of who I definitely am…the black outline around my body that everyone else seems to have.”

VIEW BETHANY’S ARTWORK AT HER WEBSITE.

ABOUT HENRY

Henry Detweiler is an Atlanta-based artist and writer working in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. In 2012, he received a BFA in Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking from Georgia State University. He has shown extensively in and around Atlanta, GA. He is represented by Dashboard Co-Op and currently serves as Events Editor for BURNAWAY.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in moments where the grotesque and beautiful intersect; in the uncanny power of objects to elicit nostalgia and nausea; in the stories that rubbish can tell.

VIEW HENRY’S ARTWORK AT HIS WEBSITE

Announcing Atlanta’s First CSA for the Arts

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

What is the WonderRoot CSA? The WonderRoot CSA (Community Supported Art) is a new model for selling and purchasing artwork, adapted from the traditional agricultural CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).

What is the purpose? The WonderRoot CSA seeks to: a) cultivate a culture of art collecting for the local arts economy and b) support Atlanta artists by commissioning them to create work

Why did we create it? WonderRoot invites art curious individuals and seasoned collectors to invest in the local arts economy by purchasing a share to Atlanta’s first ever art-based CSA, The WonderRoot CSA. By investing in local artists, customers are helping to keep local talent in Atlanta, as well as claiming their share of our city’s most gifted creators. Artist contributors are able to immediately grow their collector-base to 50 individuals, in addition to a guaranteed commission before any work is ever created. The exposure to WonderRoot’s audience throughout metro Atlanta creates even more opportunity for participating artists to develop interested buyers.

How does it work?
- 50 shares available to the public at $300/share
- Commission of 9 artists to create 50 works each
- Quarterly (total of 3) delivery of “art box” with 3 works within each delivery
- A “release party” coincides with each delivery with attendees as artists and shareholders

Who are the artists? Bethany Collins, Wret Rausaw, Henry Detweiler, Michi Meko, Patricia Patterson, Noble Beast, Jessica Caldas, Jill Frank and Nick Madden

Who else has this idea? Some awesome folks at Three Walls in Chicago, Springboard for the Arts in Michigan and good people in LA and Philly.  We’d like to give a special thanks to our friend, Paul Barrett, for helping to inspire WonderRoot CSA.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

WonderRoot CSA Advisory Committee: Austin Appleton, Eva Taylor, Brett Meager, Jimmy Hamilton, Floyd Hall, Ed Hall, Stephanie Dowda and Kris Pilcher.

ABOUT JESSICA

Jessica was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1986 but truly considers Atlanta, Georgia her home and spent most of her childhood there, drawing and spinning stories with her twin sister and elder brother. She found a new home studying Printmaking and Japanese Language & Literature at the University of Georgia. Currently, she is back in Atlanta, rediscovering the city as an adult. Jessica completed a residency at the Atlanta Printmakers Studio in the spring of 2011 and has since continued to create and show work around the city. She is presently a 2012-2013 Leap Year artist through MINT gallery’s emerging artist residency program.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Jessica uses various printmaking processes pieced together to create single unique images. This process allows her to build a layered narrative and work in a large format while simultaneously responding to the medium as the work progresses. Jessica’s work centers on relationships between people and others, the places they choose or do not choose to exist in, and the objects that surround them. The work is particularly focused within the context of certain experiences and examines the shifts that occur within these relationships.

ABOUT JILL

Jill Frank is a visual artist working primarily in photography. She received her BA in Photography from Bard College in 2001 and her MFA in Studio Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Frank recently completed the SOMA residency in Mexico City and relocated from Chicago to Atlanta to teach photography full-time at Georgia State University.

Frank’s current projects explore the history of photographic representation by creating alternate versions of images that dominate the vernacular of Western culture. Her work has shown nationally and internationally, and recent awards include grants from The City of Chicago Community Art Assistance Program and The Kentucky Foundation for Women. Selected solo exhibitions include Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago; Golden Gallery, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

VIEW JILL’S ARTWORK AT HER WEBSITE

ABOUT MICHI

Michi Meko – a skilled interdisciplinary artist and colorful personality that has established himself as the South’s preeminent creative,with an uncanny ability to inspire an urbanized aesthetic that is innovative, challenging and thoughtful.The works allude to conditions both physical and psychological. His work is a proclamation of strength, perseverance and remembrance.Michi Meko is a member of the collective Sunday Southern Art Revival and the collaborative duo TindelMichi. Meko is also a founding member of the think tank Smoke School of Art. Michi’s works have been commissioned and included in many private and corporate permanent collections including Scion Toyota Motor Company,Project Alabama, King & Spalding, Stankonia and the CW Network.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work as a interdisciplinary artist draws influence from rural southern culture and contemporary urban subcultures. I have developed a system of gathering that allows hybridizing and remixing the contents into a multilingual dialect that endows ordinary and rejected objects with historic and spiritual powers. By reworking and mashing up iconography the works began to establish a new identity. An identity with possibilities of life to come, giving voice to the forgotten and demonstrating significant resiliency and strength that offers hope and possibility. The works allude to conditions both physical and psychological. This work is a proclamation of perseverance and remembrance.

VIEW MICHI’S ARTWORK AT HIS WEBSITE

ABOUT NICK

Nick Madden was born in 1978 and raised in Mableton, Georgia. He studied drawing and painting and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia in 2002. Since then he has been creating works of art, teaching art to elementary school students, and living in Decatur, Georgia with his wife and many animals.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Mine is a junk aesthetic, using found and fabricated materials like wood, cardboard, clay, and plaster to create a big, ugly beauty. I find interest and a strange allure in piles of junk on the side of the road, trees that have been felled in a forest, buildings that are falling apart or that have been demolished, rotten wood, rotting animals, mold, mushrooms, piles of rubble, piles of sticks, piles of bricks, piles, piles, piles. Of stuff. Rather than swimming in the doom and gloom I’m turning my attention to celebrating my life and my ability to make art. Using mankind’s refuse to create lively images of humans and their environment. Life bubbling up from the trash and the ugliness. Chaotic, banged together, trying not to fuck anything up by overthinking it. Like dancing. At the end of the world.

VIEW NICK’S ARTWORK AT HIS WEBSITE 

ABOUT MR. BEAST

The Noble Beast is an Atlanta based collage artist. He has put up his collages in the streets, given away and sold many pieces to friends and friends of friends around the country. He has worked hard at becoming a legitimate self-taught artist and, though he has been invited, has never been part of a formal art show. He is happy to be a part of WonderRoot’s CSA project and thinks, no matter what you do for a living, that you’re wasting your life if you don’t create something everyday.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Too often, I think the magic that surrounds us is taken for granted. My goal, by making a visual representation of how I view the world, is to help others and myself remember that magic. To do this, I use mostly neglected, discarded books and magazines that I find on the street, in thrift stores, used book stores, flea markets and yard sales. I like to think that by combining various base materials of the past, I am creating a vision of the future. These books have sunk to the bottom of the consumer market, but are valuable because, like artifacts, they show the ideas, practices, values, beliefs and behaviors of our culture. By examining them and breathing new life into them, I hope to gain a better understanding of the world and our culture, which in turn allows people to get a better understanding of me—for whatever that’s worth.

ABOUT PATRICIA

I grew up in College Park where I attended Woodward Academy and completed a foundation year at Atlanta College of Art where I was a photography major. Then I spent the rest of my undergraduate education at Georgia State University where I changed my major from photography to psychology to education and then ended with an BFA in printmaking. My interest in watercolors came from work I was doing at GSU where I was water coloring over screen printed pictures of my family. I taught various art classes at Woodward Academy and Marist: Reach for Excellence Scholarship Program while preparing and applying for graduate school. I did my first set of watercolor portraits on wood panel for my Graduate school portfolio. I moved to San Fransisco in 2007 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute and received my MFA in painting and printmaking in 2009. While I was in San Francisco I received the Murphy Cadogen Fellowship for Painting, and exhibited at the Di Rosa MFA biennial. I returned to Atlanta in 2010 and was awarded the Forward Arts Foundation: Emerging Artist Award for 2011-2012.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My large-scale watercolor paintings investigate how we construct memories over time. I focus on childhood memories, drawing from my archive of actual family photographs taken between 1940 and 1980. These images document the family I know personally as well as those I know only from found photographs. They serve as the foundation for me to explore the nostalgia surrounding a formal family portrait or an intimate moment caught on film. When I create these paintings, I allow the watercolors to congeal and pool on synthetic paper. I vary the degree of detail with which I represent the figures central to my work, and often distort features that allude to the subject’s psychological state. My subjects slip into a background fog of geometric patterns and mundane objects. I carefully construct these backdrops referencing varied textiles, furniture, and other décor from near-distant bygone eras. By using these archival materials to explore and reinvent a family, or family moment, I create work that physically manifests the ways we mentally reconstruct our pasts.

VIEW PATRICIA’S ARTWORK AT HER WEBSITE

ABOUT WRET

Wret Rausaw was born in Atlanta, GA where he has since returned to live and work. Wret’s work has appeared in several group exhibitions in Atlanta including the Hambidge 16th Annual Art Auction at The Fay Gold Gallery; The Imaginary Million, 200 Peachtree St.; Hammonds House Museum 10th Annual Art Auction at the Bill Lowe Gallery; and Inhabited at Kibbee Gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Wret’s work revolves around the often incongruous synonyms of family and home. In addition to his continued series of photographic diptychs, he is currently working on three-dimensional memory boxes and large-scale installation projects.