Be Here Now: Mike Black, Andrew Boatright, Sandra Erbacher
July 11-August 30, 2014

Opening Reception: Fri July 11, 7pm

Be Here Now brings together three artists whose studio-based activities and site-specific installations investigate issues of presence, form, and function. Mike Black and Andrew Boatright are both Atlanta-based sculptors who deftly use a range of materials to challenge gallery environments through issues of gravity and beauty; Sandra Erbacher lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she creates humble objects and uses ‘inferior’ materials that exude a sly poetry and situational wariness.

Each artist presents a range of recent works that take advantage of the physicality and scale of ACAC’s galleries and adjacent spaces. Mike Black’s installation conceptually extends sections of metal ductwork that are part of ACAC’s facilities, thereby creating a complex arrangement of functioning and non-functioning ventilation elements. Painted gray to match the existing systems, this challenges understandings of what is permanent, temporary, absurd, and confusing.

Andrew Boatright makes provisional sculptures that sit on the floor, lean against walls, and rest on shelves. Built with scraps of wood, metal, paper and plastic, they are covered in unique industrial “goo”—a homemade mix of paint and sealant—thereby obscuring their recognition, creating chimeric, and often comic, formal agglomerations. Boatright’s forms are installed in various arrangements that heighten their sense of vulnerability, awkwardness, and isolation, conjuring human, animal, and natural hybrids.

Sandra Erbacher is part of a lineage of makers and thinkers who use their art to examine expectations and contradictions that operate at museums and galleries. In this exhibition, she presents a large photograph of a cactus, a reminder of adaptability and the ability to survive in harsh environments. Other works feature incised carpeting, a delicate gold and diamond-laden screw, and a carefully placed vent with neon signage, continuing her investigations of orientation and invasion.

In Be Here Now, viewers will be made to pay attention to many of the objects that institutions often hope they will not notice, such as air and heating ductwork, water pipes and exit signs. The exhibition title is like an edict from the artists and our Center: be present and sensitive to the conditions that surround you.

Mike Black is an Atlanta-based, sculptor, painter, and installation artist. He received his BFA with a concentration in sculpture from Georgia State University. Black works with the Mayor’s office of Cultural Affairs Public Art Dept. helping oversee the city’s public artworks, and is an art handler with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and Facilities Supervisor with DASHBOARD CO-OP. He is also a DASHBOARD CO-OP artist, an Idea Capital grant recipient, has shown all over Atlanta and is represented by Kibbee Gallery.

Andrew Boatright is an artist who currently lives and works in Atlanta. He received his MFA in drawing and painting from Georgia State University in 2013. Boatright has exhibited at Art Aqua Miami 2012, MOCA GA, and Twin Kittens Gallery, where his recent solo exhibition, TRANSMOGRIFICATION_, was recently reviewed in BURN_AWAY.

Sandra Erbacher is a German artist living and working in Madison, WI and London. She earned her BFA from Camberwell College of Art, London in 2009 and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Circuit 12 Contemporary, Dallas, The Contemporary, London, Kunstverein Speyer, Germany, Umbrella Gallery, Leeds, and Five Years, London. She is the recipient of the 2014 Chazen Prize to an Outstanding MFA Student, a University of Wisconsin fellowship and the Blink Grant for Public Art 2013 awarded by the city of Madison.

All artists are available for interview and press packets with high res images are available. Contact: Rachel Reese, rreese@thecontemporary.org for information and images.