Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys?
Curated by Corey Oberlander, Jamie Steele + Lindsey Stapleton
May 7 - June 18, 2022
Take it Easy X Whitespace
“Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?" - Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau’s Maine Woods is written from the perspective of a sort of Mother Nature as she watches some idiot sojourner try to conquer her mountain. She wonders why he's pushing so hard - and what he expects to find.
The romantic desire to return to nature presupposes that dreamlike and fulfilling experiences await us if we wander long and hard enough into the wild. However, a realistic reconveyance with nature is not about getting back to the sublime vistas painted in the 1800's - and we get into trouble when exclusively visioning nature as an experience of wonder that exists only in the remote, vast, untouched corners of the world.
Remnants of frontier tradition have resulted in a fetishization of big swaths of untainted land as truly valuable in its otherness and purity. But, in reality, how is a backyard tree less other or worthy than the trees that have never known man? By continuing to place worth on “the Big Outside”, and strengthen our disconnect from our immediate natural surroundings, we risk losing touch with actual nature altogether.
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? considers the disparity between a collective expectation of nature-as-experience and the reality of what’s actually there. The twelve participating artists present work that both directly and indirectly reacts to the trouble with the idea of wilderness, today - whether by illustrating the ways in which we irrevocably altered our big natural world, opportunities to honor or exist within real nature, or just how farcical attempts at reconveyance with the myth of true wilderness have been throughout history.
Curated by Corey Oberlander, Jamie Steele and Lindsey Stapleton while spanning both Take it Easy and Whitespace in Atlanta Georgia, Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys includes Amy Brener, Zipporah Camille, Hannah Chalew, Belleau + Churchill, Stephanie Dowda DeMer, Sandra Erbacher, Michi Meko, Maria Molteni, David Onri Anderson, Vesna Pavlović, Constance Thalken, and Wretched Flowers.
WHITESPACE
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Amy Brener was born in Victoria, BC, Canada and is currently based in Queens, New York. She is a full time faculty member at Hamilton College. Since graduating with an MFA from Hunter College in 2010, her work has exhibited at galleries and institutions in the US, Canada, Europe and China. Highlights include MoMA PS1 and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Galerie Pact in Paris, Reyes Projects in Detroit, Wentrup Gallery in Berlin, MacLaren Art Centre in Ontario and Riverside Art Museum in Beijing. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, CURA, Hyperallergic, Artnet News and The Brooklyn Rail.
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Zipporah Camille Thompson (she.her.hers) is a ceramicist, weaver, sculptor, and activist residing upon dispossessed land of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation in Atlanta, GA. With deep Carolina roots, Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay + textiles, uplifting marginalized bodies and eliciting social change through her work. Her craft-based practice acknowledges the displacement and sustained oppression of BIPOC folx. Sculpted shapeshifters and landscapes investigate hybridity – taking cues from mythology, the otherworldly, and “make-do” culture, weaving together something from nothing.
Zipporah Camille Thompson earned her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her exploratory, unconventional work calls upon craft traditions and with intercultural impact has been featured in digital and physical spaces, both nationally and internationally.
Thompson has accomplished residencies at ACRE Projects, Ox-Bow School of Art, Mass MOCA, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and POCOAPOCO, MX, amongst others. She is a recipient of a variety of accolades, including most recently, a 2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellowship recipient and a 2020 Artadia Atlanta Awardee. Zipporah Camille Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta, GA). She is a history addict, roller-skater, and lover of unicorns, zombies, the moon, tarot, and all things fantasy.
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Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator and environmental activist from New Orleans. Her artwork explores what it means to live in a time of global warming with a collective uncertain future, and specifically what that means for those of us living in Southern Louisiana. Her practice explores the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future.
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Stephanie Dowda is an artist working in the United States. Stephanie dreams in color and believes the camera can capture the spirit that resides in the world. Dowda is a Studio Artist with The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, a Vermont Studio Center Fellow, a Hambidge Fellow, a Frontier Fellow with Epicenter, and a past resident of Cabin Time. Dowda's work has appeared in Oxford American, Bad At Sports, ArtsATL, BurnAway, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and more.
stephaniedowda.comstephaniedowda.com
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Michi Meko is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award as well as a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize.
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David Onri Anderson (b. 1993, Nashville, TN) is a French-American Tennessee-born artist, musician and curator of French-Algerian Jewish ancestry. He graduated from Watkins College of Art in Nashville with the Anny Gowa Purchase Award in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Patrick Painter Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Harpy Gallery in Rutherford, NJ, David Lusk Gallery in Nashville, TN amongst others. In 2020 he published a book of drawings with Zürich-based artist book company, Nieves. He has shown at the LA Art Fair 2019 and the Hamptons Art Fair 2020. He has shown at Atlanta Contemporary Museum and Alabama Contemporary Museum. He has shown alongside artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, Claude Cahun, Martin Puryear, Katherine Bradford, Lonnie Holley, and many more. His work has been reviewed, exhibited and collected internationally with works in permanent collections including the Soho House in Los Angeles, CA, The Joseph Hotel, and the Metro Arts Library in Nashville, TN, amongst others. Anderson is founder and curator of an artist-run space called Electric Shed Gallery in Nashville, TN (2018-present). His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet, BURNAWAY, DailyLazy, Art & Antiques and more. He is currently represented by Patrick Painter Gallery.
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Vesna Pavlović (Serbia/US) obtained her MFA degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University in New York in 2007. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her projects examine the evolving relationship between memory in contemporary culture and the technologies of photographic image production. Expanding the photographic image beyond its frame, traditional format, and the narrative is central to her artistic strategies. She examines photographic representation of specific political and cultural histories, which include photographic archives and related artifacts.
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Constance Thalken (born 1952 in Nebraska) is an American intermedia artist known foremost for her photographic explorations of the complexities of loss. She has gained recognition for her ability to carefully convey subject matter that simultaneously engages the viewer perceptually, emotionally, viscerally, and intellectually.Item description.
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WRETCHED FLOWERS is a collaboration between two artists using ceramic, textiles, foraged floral design, and digital media to raise questions about ethnobotany and interspecies collaboration. All of plant material is either foraged or harvested on their property in New Fairfield, Connecticut, USA.
WHITESPEC
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Maria Molteni (They/She, b 1983, Nashville) descends from Europeans who immigrated to the colonized United States and settled as farmers and later small business owners on lands of the Cherokee, Shawnee and Yuchi, also referred to as Tennessee. Molteni is the grandchild of competitive square dancers, stunt motorcyclists, quilters, beekeepers and opera singers. Today Molteni is a Boston-based multimedia & performing artist, educator & mystic. Their practice has grown from traditional, formalist roots, studying Painting, Printmaking and Dance at Boston University, to incorporate research, social engagement and collaboration. They playfully position themselves as a Phys Ed coach for visionary communities like the Shakers or Black Mountain College.
SHEDSPACE
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Sandra Erbacher is an interdisciplinary German artist living and working between New Jersey and New York City. She has shown widely, with recent exhibitions in New York, Miami, Indiana and elsewhere. She has work in the permanent Fidelity, Tedeschi and James M. And Cathleen D. Stone Foundation and is most recently a professor at Parsons and Pratt in New York City.
TAKE IT EASY & HEADSPACE
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Raina Belleau and Caleb Churchill met in graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design. Feeling constrained by the academic structure of departments, majors and media, they began to collaborate in a variety of media. Their small, whimsical yet melancholic, early pieces soon become an entire collaborative practice. Their first exhibition, Fantasia Colorado explored the boundaries between history and legend. It was featured at GRIN in Providence and through the gallery, at Satellite Art Fair as a part of Miami Art Week. They are currently working on new projects from their shared studio in Memphis, TN.
Tremblante (Detail), Hannah Chalew, 2021
Shaker Work-Out Final Episode (still), Maria Molteni, 2021
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? will be held concurrently at Whitespace and Take it Easy from May 7 - June 11, 2022. The galleries are a 10 minute walk from each other. Opening reception will be held at the same time on May 7, 2022 - hours TBD.
WHITESPACE
Whitespace is a contemporary gallery active in Atlanta and across the southeast that seeks to foster an immersive environment of free-expression, intimacy, and dialogue. Under the direction of owner Susan Bridges, the gallery has housed numerous exhibitions across all mediums promoting artistic innovation and inquiries into the relationships that define who we are, both collectively and as individuals. As a respected institution in Atlanta’s art community, whitespace and the artists it houses continue to inspire all who attend through thoughtful examinations of the world around us, allowing viewers a new mode of seeing beyond meaning.