Teddy Johnson's painting "Jenny's Ledge" is on display at the ACC Library through August.

High Anxiety: I couldn’t help but think of the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s Vertigo when I first saw UGA MFA graduate Teddy Johnson’s series of paintings “From Great Heights” on view at the Athens-Clarke County Library. The colorful scenes of city rooftops seem to belong more to the world of Technicolor than real life, and the subject of the paintings themselves—figures balanced precariously atop ledges and roof tops—calls to mind the police chase that left James Stewart dangling from a San Francisco high-rise. Of course, a comparison to the painter so often linked to the cinematic Master of Suspense, Edward Hopper, seems apt, but Johnson appears only to share a predilection for everyday urban life and vivid colors with the mid-century artist. Instead of mystery or apprehension, Johnson engenders his figures with a sense of elation that makes them capable of standing on one foot on the thin pinnacle of a roof. The energy and literal buoyancy of these figures is especially interesting considering that the scenes are most likely borrowed from the artist’s place of residence, Baltimore, whose traditionally industry-based economy has recently undergone dramatic changes that include rising crime. But as Johnson’s figures suggest, a call for optimism could be in order.

Antediluvian: While Johnson’s paintings imbue everyday people and commonplace metropolitan scenes with a sense of exuberance that enables them to transcend their mundane circumstances, Scott Belville’s figurative paintings at the Lamar Dodd School of Art fill the more familiar landscape of the South with a somber, at times almost elegiac tone. This is especially true of Belville’s new series of drawings entitled “Flood/Drought,” for which Belville imagined a world of gnarled tree roots intertwined with bulbous, skull-like shapes, charred tree stumps marred by axes and dirty, effluvial bodies of water. These decaying ecosystems work as thinly veiled allegories of the present, taking on the hefty theme of the troubled environment. Traces of humanity or figures appear in most of these drawings, such as a solemn-faced pregnant woman standing on the edge of a pool of brown water in “Flood/Drought: Edge.” Accompanied by a lifeless stuffed deer and the spectral outline of a man on stilts, she engenders a sense of hopelessness that belies the sense of birth and rejuvenation she ought to embody.

While framing and presentation are always considerations for an artist, Belville’s series incorporates process and theme into the presentation. Taped onto foam board with the drips and splatters still evident from the artist’s process, the presentation of the drawings (something that Belville has had fun with throughout his career, as in the 2004 painting included in this show, “Drive-By,” that is framed to look like it is a large painting in a miniature gallery) reflects the deepest content of the drawings themselves: the way permanent acts and their marks (large and small) become a vital aspect for consideration. Ultimately, though Belville is taking subject matter that can easily become preachy or hackneyed, his drawings avoid these pitfalls through his subtle and elegant treatment. Also present in the gallery are several series of portraits that skeptically approach the supernatural with figures offering little more than card tricks and cheap spectacle, such as “Soothsayers,” “Gamblers/Money Managers” and “Augurs.”

Atom, the Bomb: While Belville’s images of the contemporary South hint at a Faulknerian preoccupation with corruption and decay, the South—new and old—gets a serious and refreshing makeover in Michael Lachowski’s “CHAD: Charleston Historical Art, Dude.” On view at White Tiger Gourmet, the series of photographs are being shown together for the first time since they were exhibited in the city to which they pay homage, Charleston. Part of Lachowski’s larger body of work, “Atomlook,” which features the same model, Atom, in a series of photographs taken throughout 2006, each photo of the “CHAD” series is a portrait of an important character from Charleston’s over-touted history. But, the tableaus include flagrantly a-historical costumes and details and look more like a sunny fashion shoot (for, say something along the lines of Lachowsky's Athens mag, Young, Foxy & Free) than anything you’re likely to see in a history book. For example, John Rutledge, South Carolina’s first governor and signee of the U.S. Constitution, is re-imagined by Lachowski as young Atom signing a guestbook on a coffee table in a beige-and-white contemporary interior. If you look carefully, you might notice that the pen Atom uses is a souvenir from the John Rutledge house, and even if you’re not looking carefully, you probably won’t miss a popular staple of Americana, the ubiquitous PBR can. Like Belville’s drawings, presentation is thematic: each image is bordered by a digital gold frame and plaque that is as flagrantly fake as the "historic moment" it frames. Like Johnson's and Belville’s paintings, lines separating past, present and future, the real and the imagined, become blurred in Lachowski’s photographs. Yet instead of talismans for a hopeful future or omens of manmade apocalypse, Lachowski seems to remind us that history itself is most likely equal parts fact, fiction and fantasy.

Rebecca Brantley