Four Atlantans

SALTWORKS Gallery is pleased to present Four Atlantans, an exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture spotlighting recent works from four of the gallery's Atlanta-based artists in our new West Midtown location. The exhibition celebrates the cultural convergence found in the city with the work of four distinct Atlanta artists hailing from Cuba (Alejandro Aguilera), Chicago (Brian Dettmer), West Virginia (Craig Drennen) and South Korea (Jiha Moon).

Alejandro Aguilera works in painting, drawing and sculpture. He began exploring the red clay of Georgia as a medium after moving to Atlanta in 1998. Employing a modernist sense of proportion, for this exhibition Aguilera combines and breaks two ink drawings of a congested dystopian architectural landscape with the simplicity of a red clay square painted onto the wall's surface.

Brian Dettmer is a sculptor working with books and other forms of antiquated media. In his sculptures, he reinterprets the organization of information and our view of knowledge by cutting into outdated reference books. He carves the sealed books page by page, cutting windows to the information beneath. He often plays with the graphic design and text of the work in a Dadaist manner creating obsure connections within the context of the found book.

Craig Drennen is a painter and conceptual artist. In his work he combines the entire language of painting from abstraction to representation. He frequently highlights the plasticity of the medium by stretching its physical properties from thin drippy brushstrokes to thick blobs squeezed directly from the tube. A fan of the theatrical production, he brings the mindset of a director by seeing how many roles paint can play.

Jiha Moon considers herself a "cartographer of culture" spotlighting connections in popular culture and art history by employing techniques from tradition Asian painting to abstract expressionism to craft art. Slowing interpretation through altering familiar artifacts, she embeds these symbols in floating landscapes of overlapping color washes, impromptu marks and collage.