Element, ‘Summer season in Havana (for W.DeK)’ (2024-2025) by Michael David. (Images courtesy of Johnson Lowe Gallery)
Positioned as a response to fast-paced swipe tradition, the autumn group exhibition at Johnson Lowe Gallery brings collectively 12 artists whose work explores Encounters — the act of going through one thing lengthy sufficient to be remodeled by it. The exhibition textual content asks, “What does it imply to face earlier than a picture in a society that circumstances us to skim, swipe, react and transfer on?” and goes on to say that “These works demand presence . . . Their complexity unfolds regularly, providing one thing lasting in trade for one thing from the viewer: time, consideration, endurance.” This exhibition faucets right into a post-lockdown cultural impulse to return to bodily experiences, which has even led some to revert to landlines and different analog practices that resist superficial urgency and reclaim consideration.
Embedded on this curatorial framing is a deeper ontological assertion: The artworks in Encounters will not be inert objects however have the capability to type an “trade” with the viewer. Have an effect on idea, as described by Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, clarifies this relationality, describing it as, “intensities that cross physique to physique (human, nonhuman) . . . very important forces insisting past emotion — that may serve to drive us towards motion, towards thought and extension.” At a time of movement-building, this idea underscores artwork’s skill to compel us to really feel what we’ve turn into numb to after which to behave.
The curation largely lives as much as this metaphysical declare, providing transformative trade by way of works in two fundamental classes: energetic materiality and subversive fabrication by way of new applied sciences.
The again room of the gallery anchors the exhibition’s thesis with works by giants Judy Pfaff, Sam Gilliam and Michael David. Every artist has spent many years innovating their mediums and increasing abstraction conceptually and spatially. Their works don’t simply occupy house — they animate it, nonetheless vibrating the power from the artist poured into them.
Embodying this materialism is Pfaff’s Cat’s Paw (2025), a heart-shaped amalgamation that bulges off the wall. The work synthesizes Pfaff’s lived atmosphere right into a type of its personal changing into: bathe sandals and kitchen sponges are reborn as abacus beads, colourful lights illuminate pom poms and marbled urethane contrasts with the zig-zagged order of a contorted plastic mat. Pfaff’s imaginative reuse is a joyous tackle the weird excrement of the Anthropocene. Her radical looseness opens up a subject of risk, suggesting that these supplies may turn into an infinite variety of issues: lemons into lemonade.
Close by, David’s The Mattress and the Bell Jar (2015-2025) and Gilliam’s Parted Iron (1973) additionally supply visceral encounters by way of freedom of expression. David’s roughly-hewn, painted development rises into what Robert Smithson describes as a “smash in reverse,” a monument born out of and into the decay of commercial modernity. Glass shards mirror outward, providing a second of self-recognition the place the viewer is cut up between seeing and being seen. This fearless and fragile work helps the exhibition’s declare most overtly — that the encounter is a mutual trade, a mirror by way of which presence itself turns into materials.
Gilliam’s Parted Iron strikes a extra mournful chord, like a cello singing an octave beneath Pfaff and David’s saxophones. Its stained floor pulses with matter in movement, tapping right into a deep time language of common power: White specks froth like a crashing wave; patches of burnt sienna unfold like rust and an orb of yellow diffuses just like the morning solar. To face earlier than the portray is to face the elegant — the painful consciousness of the world’s infinite magnificence and the brevity of our time inside it.
The present goes on to broaden its exploration of fabric encounter by way of images, textiles and printmaking. Photographers Letha Wilson and Chip Moody each use materials interventions to complicate how place is seen and felt, remodeling images right into a spatial expertise. In Hawaii Palms Layered Concrete (2024), Wilson interrupts crumpled foliage prints with poured patches of concrete, mirroring the perils of commercial land growth. Moody’s Open Swim (2020) arranges 3x5s of abstracted water into the form of a public pool, a web site of communal pleasure shadowed by histories of segregation and anti-Blackness, with pushpin shadows showing like ghostly figures throughout the rippled floor. Each artists bother the {photograph}’s flatness, revealing that place is rarely singular and at all times constructed.
Vibrant materialism continues in Jamele Wright’s hand-dyed and sewn BROWN, Conceptually: 2 (2025) and Sergio Suarez’s painted woodcut print Lamentation (2025), tactile works that start new surfaces out of fabric traditions. Nevertheless, Wright’s placement behind a glass wall lessens its affective energy, whereas one in every of Suarez’s unique woodblocks would have asserted the present’s materials focus extra vividly, as an object bearing the immediacy of his hand-carved particulars immediately into the wooden matrix.
The curatorial argument that each one works “demand presence” does falter, nonetheless. Utilized evenly, shut statement exposes uneven outcomes all through the gallery, making some works sing whereas others lose their enchantment, significantly Kathryn Kampovsky’s thinner abstraction Unmade (2025) and Daniel Byrd’s DRY HUMOR (2020) which shrouds its materials potential beneath a constructed system. These works may firmly stand on their very own in different contexts, however inside this curation they neither assist nor develop the present’s strategies of encounter.
Different artists have interaction encounters by subverting new applied sciences to create their work. This inclusion expands the present’s thesis, resisting /dangerous binary of analog/digital, suggesting that intentional hybridity with tech, not mere rejection, is a extra cheap antidote to our present situation. For instance, painter Ben Steele turns monuments into ruins, combining 3D printing, age-old still-life practices and little buttery brushstrokes to think about scenes of historical expertise or future societal collapse. Along with Rush Baker’s Whispers Alongside the Alexandria Canal II (2024) and Suarez’s Lamentation, each near-apocalyptic renderings, it’s exhausting to inform the previous from the long run — however that’s the purpose. This grouping begins the present with an ending, a poignant reminder of false binaries and life’s cyclical nature.
Photograph collages and a brief movie by Rashaad Newsome deepen this idea by situating AI in a Black, Queer context, revealing how mainstream expertise enacts the values of its white heteronormative overlords. The work facilities round Newsome’s creation of Being the Digital Griot, an AI mannequin constructed from motion-captures of vogue fem performers, Black Queer ASL interpreters, Ghanaian textiles, fractal patterns and a Black curriculum, enabling Being to even educate decolonial workshops which have moved actual audiences to tears. The work is designed to be an ethic of care, used to heal not hurt, which raises questions on how Being is powered, particularly because the curation asks us to think about artwork’s bodily impression. Sadly, each immediate for Being depends on the identical information facilities as ChatGPT et al, straining water and power grids that disproportionately have an effect on Black communities within the South. This doesn’t negate the resonance of the work however reveals a chance for additional values alignment in its materials impact. Since Being is positioned to think about a world of freedom for Black communities, may it think about a non-extractive strategy to energy itself?
As artist Jenny Odell writes, “It’s with acts of consideration that we resolve who to listen to, who to see and who in our world has company. On this approach, consideration types the bottom not only for love however for ethics.” Encounters reminds us that artwork is an area to apply this sustained consideration and that spotlight results in feeling after which to care. In an age saturated with data and information, we frequently know all of the horrors and even the options, however we don’t know easy methods to really feel, which can clarify our inaction. The exhibition positions trade as each methodology and purpose, inviting us to decelerate and listen lengthy sufficient to be remodeled.
Encounters will stay on view at Johnson Lowe Gallery by way of November 29.
Editor’s observe: the writer will likely be moderating a panel for this exhibition on Saturday, October 25 at 1 p.m., that includes Daniel Byrd, Michael David, Chip Moody and Letha Wilson.
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Heather Chicken Harris is an Atlanta-based artist, unbiased curator, occasional author and training chief. Her interdisciplinary work investigates the throughlines between land historical past and ecological crises, partaking with communities, scientists and place-based supplies to analyze prospects for emergence and methods change. Harris’ writing has appeared in ArtsATL, ART PAPERS, Burnaway and Scalawag (forthcoming). She holds a B.S. in artwork historical past from Skidmore Faculty, a grasp’s in training management from Columbia College and is finishing her MFA in portray at Georgia State College.