The Athenaeum
Atlanta Art Week Event:
Fission or, Eclipse
The Athenaeum | OTP
The Athenaeum, 287 W Broad St, Athens, GA 30605
UGA invites Atlanta Art Week patrons to visit the Athenaeum, the university’s contemporary art gallery in downtown Athens, to view the solo exhibition Rose Salane: Fission, or Eclipse, on view through November 23.
About Event:
Fission or, Eclipse
September 12 - November 23
Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage.
The works in this exhibition offer an oblique view on tumultuous historical shifts: A series of diary entries describing an eclipse during the last year of the Civil War; a 1947 solicitation letter from Albert Einstein to academic institutions asking for the contribution of funding towards nuclear fission and atomic energy research; a set of decommissioned traffic light lenses suggesting a city grid in disarray. Together these object sets form dynamic intersections across time, war, observation, and power; their narrative contingencies underscoring the politics of the archive.
Challenging viewers to find commonalities and disjunctions among the exhibition’s many parts, Salane also raises profound questions about the voices and objects charged with telling our histories: Whose thoughts, whether mundane or profound, have been preserved for future generations? What objects, though silent, speak on our behalf, and whose job is the work of their translation? Salane’s exhibition, a translation in its own right, is also a careful curation that uses the methods of the archive to put its limitations and potential on display.
About Organization:
The Athenaeum is a non-collecting contemporary art gallery affiliated with the University of Georgia and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
The mission of the Athenaeum is to pursue art and ideas with rigor; to serve as a flexible space that invites extended looking and encourages critical thinking. We are dedicated to presenting the work of major artists in the field of contemporary art as well as centering under-recognized and emerging artists in the commission of new works and projects.
In our five thousand square foot building, we house an art gallery, a space for workshops, lectures, and classes as well as a Reading Room to peruse texts and listen to records that connect with the exhibitions in the gallery. The gallery produces exhibitions and programming that examine the cultural and social contexts around us, challenge contemporary perceptions of art making to provide a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry.
athenaeum.uga.edu | @athartgallery
Hours of Operation:
Wednesday-Friday from 12 noon to 6 pm
We are closed on home game days and major holidays.