Open Studios

Known for incorporating the “glitch” aesthetic into the ceramic vernacular, A-Johnson’s work addresses thoughts of memory, technological integration, mark making, and perceptual consciousness. While his original draw to the ceramic medium was the physical nature in which it is manipulated, during Graduate school at Arizona State University, He found clay to be a relevant medium to explore the relationship of illusion and form, thought and physicality. A-Johnson has continued the exploration of these ideas and processes through multiple relocations, including time spent as a visiting artist at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, and an Assistant Professor at Buffalo State College. He most recently transitioned from being a full time studio artist in Copenhagen, Denmark to join Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA as an Assistant Professor. A-Johnson’s work has been recognized nationally and internationally through awarded grants, exhibitions, and residencies. In 2012 he was awarded the Emerging Artist Award through NCECA, and most recently received an exhibition grant from the Danish Cultural Ministry to complete a residency and exhibition opportunity through C.R.E.T.A. Rome. For this opportunity he continued to integrate digital processes with traditional forming and surface treatments. This act reflects the current state of human experience, as we navigate between actuality and the illusions presented by our screens.

Marc Brotherton is currently an Artist in Resident at the Atlanta Contemporary. He regularly exhibits his work in solo and group exhibitions at museums, art centers, and art fairs throughout the US. Brotherton has exhibited at White Columns, Causey Contemporary Fine Art, George Billis Gallery, The Brooklyn Arts Council, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Hathaway Gallery, Day & Night Projects, Sandler Hudson Gallery, and Kiang Gallery. Brotherton received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the City University of New York at Brooklyn College in NYC, and his BFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Killskreen Painting is best thought about as metaphor. Brotherton plays with images and language that reference the digital screen. He wants to activate the viewer through painting. Some would say that there is a need for Killskreen Painting.

-Killskreen Painting to fight the Machine
-Killskreen Painting for never giving up
-Killskreen Painting to help heal the psyche
-Killskreen Painting to help make you more attractive
-Killskreen Painting for going beyond.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, In Kyoung Chun received the Emerging Artist Award 2012-2013 by the City of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs. Chun has participated in exhibitions including High Museum of Art of Atlanta, Athens Institute of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Poem 88 gallery, Hathaway Contemporary, Mint Gallery, Gallery 72 of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs, Aqua Miami Art Fair, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Albany Museum of Fine Art of Georgia and 1780 Gallery, Virginia Museum of Fine Art of Richmond.

In the spring of 2020, Chun joined the Atlanta Contemporary Studio program and had her two-person show at Project:ARTspace in New York City. She recently participated in the following exhibitions; She Is Here at Atlanta Contemporary, In Search For Home at Dalton gallery of Agnes Scott College and Light Up Midtown in Columbus, Georgia. In 2021, Chun had her solo show ‘Table and Cloud’ at Blue Heron Nature Preserve of Atlanta and participated in the ArtFields in Lake City, South Carolina.

Chun’s work has been included to its permanent collection of High Museum of Art, the City of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs and Fulton County Public Library of Atlanta.

MaDora Frey, originally from Georgia, employs a diverse artistic practice to explore her romantic regard for both the natural and built environment and her search for the sublime. Frey’s work takes the form of temporary installations created outdoors, of which only a photograph remains, large-scale public works, and studio works. Her notable commissions include large-scale outdoor public works created for the Katonah Museum of Art, Dashboard US at Woodruff Park, and Perennial Projects. Frey’s recent exhibitions include solo and two-person shows at Massey Klein Gallery, NY, Georgia State University Welch Gallery and Camayuhs Gallery, Atlanta GA. She received her MFA in painting, magna cum laude, from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA, with a concentration in drawing and printmaking, from Auburn University. Additionally, Frey studied at the Florence Academy, Florence, Italy. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

Sara Hornbacher is a pioneer of video art and digital imaging. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Fine Art, she completed at Masters Degree at SUNY/Buffalo where she studied video with the Vasulkas at the Center for Media Study. Hornbacher was Guest editor of the first CAA ART JOURNAL issue on Video in 1985. She completed her first residency at the Experimental TV Center in 1976 and annual residencies at ETC continued through 2011. Her annual Signal Culture residencies began in 2014 and continue in 2018 The artist’s single- channel video works and multi-media installations have been exhibited throughout the USA, Europe, Australia, and Japan, including MOMA, PS1, The Whitney Museum Art, The Kitchen, Postmasters and New Math Gallery, The Bronx Museum for the Arts in NY, MOCA/GA, the Fay Gold Gallery, and The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center where she mounted a large-scale interactive installation environment, “A Thousand Plateaus” in 2001. She is currently a Studio Artist at The Contemporary. Hornbacher has received numerous grants and awards including a 1985 Media Production grant from NYSCA and The Mayor’s Fellowship in the Arts from the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Arts in 2000. ”Transfigured Time”, a 40’ photomural composed of 128 portraits of Atlantans was commissioned for Course E at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. In 2012, she became a Legacy Artist at The Burch eld Penney Art Center in Buff alo, NY and her video work is being archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. In 2020, she received a $5000 “Artist’s Relief” Grant.
Hornbacher’s work, “Precession of the Simulacra” a five-monitor installation was shown at MOMA/PS! In J in a year-long exhibition, January 2018. In March 2019, she represented Atlanta with a projection of Numerical Studies III at the Everson Museum’s year-long exhibition, “Video in America”. In 2020, her work, “Precession of the Simulacra” was selected by curator, Laura McGough for Hallwall’s “Signal, Skin, Pixel, Camera”, an online series which ended on July 31 Her installation “Precession: Flag Finale” is currently on exhibit.at OCA’s t Gallery 72, through the Inauguration on January 20, 2021.

Jaime Keiter is an artist working primarily in the medium of ceramics. She graduated with an art degree from the University of Georgia in 2001 and worked as a photo editor at various fashion and design magazines in New York City for 15 years before returning to Atlanta in 2016. Her ceramic sculptures are collaged from individually handcrafted and glazed porcelain tiles. Her process begins with cutting geometric and organic shapes from porcelain slabs, underglazing patterns and textures, and then finishing each tile with a variety of different mid-fire glazes including copper washes, turquoise, creamy pastels, and bold primaries. These elements are then collaged together to create the sculptures. The works are inspired by the Bauhaus art of 1920’s Pre-War Germany and the Postmodern Memphis design movement of the 1980’s. She is interested in the intersection both of these movements have between fine art and craft that combine to make functional and non-functional design objects. She has exhibited with Daily Operation in Brooklyn, New York as well as Swan Coach House and Poem88 in Atlanta. Her art has been featured in various publications including Sight Unseen, Design Milk, Architectural Digest and Vogue.

Julia Kouneski investigates empathy, embodiment, and the fluidity of the self through a multidisciplinary practice spanning performance, video/film, and participatory projects. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Southern California, and has independently studied somatic movement and bodywork practices over the last 10 years that contribute to her research of the body and performance. Her work has been shown in spaces such as Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Annka Kultys Gallery (London), and De Hallen Haarlem Museum (Netherlands), and has been supported by grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. She is a former artist of the Studio Artist Program at the Atlanta Contemporary, and has guest taught and lectured at Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles), Goldsmiths University (London), Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MN), Macalester College (St Paul, MN), and Emory University (Atlanta, GA).

Kelly Taylor Mitchell (b. 1994, USA) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary and a Working Artist Project Fellow at MOCA GA. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture and the Art Program Director at Spelman College. Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora, in order to present speculative futures, specifically related to concepts of community autonomy, swamp marronage, and inherited/constructed identity. Utilizing printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and textiles her work manifests as immersive installations, performative objects, and partnered artists books offering a venue for the sensorial –specifically smell- to connect to, convey, and reimagine rituals and rites of autonomous kin, collectives, and individuals of the Africana Diaspora.

Kirstin Mitchell is a multi-media artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Mitchell creates experiential environments in various mediums including, painting, installation and performance. Her work has been shown throughout the East Coast and Internationally, in Austria and Italy. Mitchell is a recent MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow. She has performed with the support of the Franklin Furnace Fund in Manhattan, New York. Mitchell’s work has been featured in publications including Art in America, Art Papers and Flash Art magazines.

Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, WI; lives in Atlanta, GA) received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2011. Her work has recently been exhibited in “Between the Waters” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and “Photography Today: Public Private Relations” at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. She has had solo shows at Document Gallery, Chicago (2015, 2017) and Hester, New York (2015) and was included in ATLBNL: The Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2016) among numerous group exhibitions at Downs & Ross, New York (2017), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2016), Galerie Division, Montreal (2016), and Ellis King, Dublin (2015). She has contributed to publications including BURNAWAY, The Creative Independent, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Art Papers, and has curated exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary, and elsewhere. In 2016-17, while she and her husband, artist Jason Benson, were studio residents at Atlanta Contemporary, they operated the artist-run space Species out of their shared studio. Species continues to occasionally produce exhibitions itinerantly, most recently presenting the work of Rhode Island-based artist Harry Gould Harvey IV at Atlanta Contemporary earlier this year.

Maryam Palizgir is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who was born and raised in Iran. She received her MFA from Georgia State University in 2018. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, UK, France, Russia, Germany, and Iran. Palizgir’s work has been featured in many major publications. She won the first prize for conceptual arts in the 6^th Iran International Green Film and Visual art Festival (IIGFF6). She was an artist in residence at the Cornelius Art Foundation in Lagamas, France in 2014, and received a grant from Triangle Network in London.

Maryam Palizgir practice is an amalgam of subject matter process study and material- manipulation of forms in space. She seeks to capture the tensions existing between traditions and contemporaneity, reality and aspirations, individuality and community, localism and universality, authority and freedom, conformism and self-expression. She is preoccupied with finding new ways of seeing through the experimental cross-fertilization of drawing, printmaking, sculpture, painting, and photography which stimulated a philosophically oriented questioning of vision and perception. Exploring the ways we exchange knowledge, and how perception widens our perspective, and how observation deepens our understanding of the reality in which we live. She challenges viewers’ perception and seeks works of art that activate once the viewer is involved.

The material study steers her to think about the flexibility of materials. Palizgir has been working with multi-layered industrial materials like fiberglass screen mesh, reflective sheets, natural and artificial light, and acrylic paint. The net visual embodiment of her installation creates a transition of dimensionality, depicting the state of ephemerality and constant change, combined with the possibility of the viewers’ displacement.

JD Walsh is a multimedia artist. He has exhibited at galleries internationally including Halsey McKay, Cleopatra’s, 106 Green, Brennan & Griffin, and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York, Galerie Steinek in Vienna, and Cooper Cole in Toronto. In 2012 his public art installation “Ensemble for Mixed Use” was commissioned by the City of Toronto for the 2012 Nuit Blanche festival. His work has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. His ongoing music project Shy Layers has garnered critical acclaim and was listed as one of the top 20 electronic albums of 2016 by Pitchfork.