Other than Amber Boardman's great quilt and a few other interesting pieces, this year's Atlanta Biennial (renamed "the talent show") is a bust. The assembled work fails to capture the vibrancy and imagination of Atlanta artist, who I've found to be waaaaaaaay more talented and ambitious than Atlanta deserves. I did want to mention one artist that stood out to me, though. Suellen Parker creates clay figures in everyday tableaus, then meticulously photographs them and tweaks them with digital details lifted from real humans. The results are extraordinarily creepy. When I dug through her website, I realized that I had seen her work several weeks before, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.
Parker's empathetic portraits manage to catch something touching about human beings striving to improve themselves. The figures are often caught in moments of introspection, which adds to their otherworldy, voyeuristic quality. The New York Times made a great video on her process, which involves creating a clay figure around an armature, photographing life models, then combining the two into an eerie digital print. Parker likens the digital tweaking to painting--she is literally digitally painting the surface of the clay using Photoshop. Finally! Digital ceramics!
