Material Deposits is a group exhibition focusing on the physical world—what it is made of and how it can be experienced and understood. The participating artists work in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and video, and they each combine elements of the real and the represented. Their objects and images present nature as a shifting space that can include tree roots and minerals as well as real estate and urban detritus. Consumer items (bread, jam, stereo equipment) are used to examine conditions of desire and the promise of satisfaction.

In Elonda Billera’s work, the familiar becomes strange and oddly sensual. She uses food like an ensemble of actors, moving and emoting while being captured on video or cast in bronze.

Moses Nornberg’s sculptures are “collections” of music-related matter that address conditions of obsession and obsolescence. Records, turntables, and speakers are exploited for their formal geometries and connection to specific eras.

Process and precision are key aspects of Seana Reilly’s paintings and drawings. Using liquid graphite for its rich tonal range and mutability, the artist plays the organic against the architectural in dynamic ways.

Brion Nuda Rosch is fascinated by the parameters of the artist’s studio. His installations incorporate pedestals, plaster, paint, and book pages brought together to form a meditation on making.

David Shaw’s sculptures combine elaborately carved and cast forms with psychedelic laminates. He teases the natural towards the cultural, asking questions about where and how we can comprehend the sublime.

Leslie Shows makes hybrid paintings that bring together polymers, pigments, metal !lings, and other matter gathered from industrial sites. She operates between the raw and the refined, shifting between acts of depositing and depicting.

Working from photographs, maps, and city plans, Weston Teruya makes work that depicts the evolution of urban environments. Built using cut, folded, and glued paper or board, his sprawling sculptures offer a critique of the politics of place.

Material Deposits features four recipients of the 2009 Artadia Award in San Francisco (Nornberg, Rosch, Shows, Teruya), alongside artists from Atlanta (Reilly), Los Angeles (Billera), and New York (Shaw). This is the second exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center developed in partnership with the Artadia Exhibitions Exchange program; Embodying was presented Jan 7-Mar 20, 2011, and included James Gobel, Allison Smith, and Richard T. Walker. Both exhibitions are supported through Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue with lead support by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Images:
Leslie Shows, Untitled (detail), 2011, Acrylic, Plexiglas, metal filings, crushed glass on aluminum, 48 × 82 inches, Courtesy the artist
Seana Reilly, TippingPoint (detail), 2011, Graphite on Dibond, 36 × 48 inches, Courtesy the artist
Elonda Billera, After Will Have Been Before (III), 2009, Bronzed Pillsbury Biscuits, 9 × 6 × 5 inches, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Janice Gomez