Photo Credit: Barbette Houser
Brittany Lauback and Shoni Rancher at the Gallery@Hotel Indigo
Didi Dunphy, curator and director of the Gallery@Hotel Indigo, held yet another lively party at the space last Thursday to welcome its latest show, “Ornament,” which will be on view at the gallery through Friday, Apr. 3. As is often the case, the show features work by a mix of artists from Atlanta and Athens, some of them students and some of them more established.
“For January, I try to design a show that is bright in nature—not just in color and style, but also in feeling and generosity,” says Dunphy.
The show opens with “Evening Flourish,” a wintry, highly abstracted and stylized landscape painted in acrylic and mixed media by Terri Dilling. According to the Atlanta-based painter and printmaker, these evoked vistas also have “microscopic worlds contained within.”
Works by Laura Bell, who teaches at Kennesaw State University, are also filled with graceful and sensual patterns and flourishes. Pen and ink drawings from her “Entangled Animals” series feature wild animals that emerge from swirling flora and fauna. These intricate drawings are small in scale and feature mating snakes and a mole, among other subjects.
Other artists in the show include Cameron Lyden, Jessica Machacek, Cassidy Russell and Brittany Lauback. Their works consist of a diversity of media, including graphite on bristol and embroidered and printed paper.
Lauback contributes several large photographs to the show. One depicts a feather suspended by a string and hovering in front of a honeycomb pattern. It is rendered in great detail; the worn flaws in the feather conjure up a lifetime of experience. Another pigment print features a piece of petrified wood, glowing like amber and dripping in highlights, seemingly suspended in black nothingness.
According to Lauback, who received her MFA in photography from UGA in 2014 and now freelances in Athens, the subjects of the photographs “make you question the weight and the purpose of what’s behind it.”
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