Hidden on the second floor of an old warehouse building in the Westside’s White Provision District, Poem 88 is the Atlanta arts community’s best kept secret.
The one room gallery, which moved to its current location on 1170 Howell Mill Rd. in June, provides a display space for emerging artists. It hosts artists who use traditional mediums such as painting, drawing, photography and sculpture, and artists who work with photography and filmmaking.
Poem 88’s current exhibit, Brambles, Roads, and Fields, is free and features 27 oil paintings and one painted sculpture. The collection, created by local artists Micah Cash, Mark Leibert and Hannah Tarr, features contemporary depictions of landscapes, foliage and flowers.
The gallery’s bare wooden floors and white brick walls epitomize simplicity. Due to the space’s openness, visitors can begin their viewing experience with any painting. Though walking into such a sparsely furnished room is slightly disorienting, the gallery’s relatively small size creates an intimate atmosphere.
Viewing Brambles, Roads, and Fields has a calming effect; the artists’ visions, which guided their brush-strokes, seem to linger on the canvas. While some of the artworks’ geometric patterns are quite graphic, the art’s largely pastel palette creates a softness throughout the exhibit. Circling through this cotton candy colored dream world invokes fantasy.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that all of these works reveal not simply, ‘ a landscape,’ but something more personal about the interior landscape,” Poem 88 curator Robin Bernat wrote in her exhibit statement.
Bernat developed her love for art after visiting world-renowned art museums in New York City. While viewing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Monet’s Years at the Giverny, she first glimpsed one of the Italian artist’s famous water lily paintings. Bernat’s passion for naturalistic artwork was born.
“Maybe this devotion to the landscape is my own religion,’’ she wrote. “I feel rooted and in awe simultaneously.’’
Bernat’s devotion to the natural world is easily observed through the exhibit, yet each of the show’s three artists approach the theme in different ways. Liebert supplies the most realistic paintings, but he also creates illusion through his playful use of shading. In his “Idlewood,” two tree trunks lie on a blue-green foreground, which is painted with a dappled effect, blurring the horizon line and barrier between earth and sky.
“There is a sense of danger but also of magic as the edge of the forest is being explored,” Liebert said.
This contrast between light and dark make Liebert’s “Glimmer” and “Virgo Series” impactful as well. The former depicts light coming through trees while the latter is an interpretation of nightskies.
“Whenever I see a glare or light shimmering, I see it as a star being created,” Liebert said.
Cash’s works are recreations of specific hydroelectric dams and the landscape around their industrial facilities, including the dams themselves, the navigational locks, and surrounding embankments. He paints in a more futuristic style marked by sharply defined color bands layered on top of landscapes.
“The color palette, perspectival space and hard-edged forms are based upon those memories of what it was like to experience those spaces,” Cash said.
His “Milton Hill, Upstream”, part of his Hydropower series, depicts the artist’s interpretation of one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s hydroelectric generation facilities. Cash includes a wood-colored band which stretches across the middle of the canvas, perhaps an allusion to the power people assert over the environment.
“If something is hard-edged, that’s where [humans have controlled nature], whereas the more organic/scraped on/fluid areas are those locations where nature is still wild.”
Tarr’s works are whimsically innovative yet delicate. She created “Holes,” the brightly painted dirt and plaster forms showcased in a wooden platform in the center of the gallery. Some of her work, such as “Sky profile” seems to stray from the exhibit’s theme. This intriguing piece features an outline of a woman’s profile layered on top of a streaked sky. The hollow space depicts a woman’s face which is filled with several infinity and cross-shaped symbols.
“Sky profile,” like all works showcased in the exhibit, is available for purchase.
Poem 88 will close Brambles, Roads, and Fields on Aug. 28. The gallery will unveil Atlanta artist Brendan Carroll’s solo exhibit, Decals, on Sept. 11.
