Intermission by Nashville outsider artist Harry Underwood
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Without anyone planning it, several exhibitions in Atlanta museums and galleries address the continuously contentious issue of identity - American, ethnic, social, personal and how the terms you choose make a difference. These shows mostly make no exalted theoretical claims. This makes them even more valuable as places to contemplate who we are, who we think we are and how we define "we."
It's been said that the wondrous work of self-taught painter Harry Underwood, a former construction worker, combines Henry Darger's figuration with Howard Finster's love of text. However, the work in the Nashville artist's Red-Letter Days at Decatur's Different Trains Gallery through March 2, will not likely be confused with either Darger's or Finster's.
Without anyone planning it, several exhibitions in Atlanta museums and galleries address the continuously contentious issue of identity - American, ethnic, social, personal and how the terms you choose make a difference. These shows mostly make no exalted theoretical claims. This makes them even more valuable as places to contemplate who we are, who we think we are and how we define "we."
It's been said that the wondrous work of self-taught painter Harry Underwood, a former construction worker, combines Henry Darger's figuration with Howard Finster's love of text. However, the work in the Nashville artist's Red-Letter Days at Decatur's Different Trains Gallery through March 2, will not likely be confused with either Darger's or Finster's.
Few would picture Finster making the epistemological observation in the painting Intermission that "meaning is a dynamic of uncertainty," complemented by the offhand remark that "inertia is an enemy of the yo-yo." The same holds true for Disgraced Americans, in which Underwood captions a service station labeled "American" with a pithy note that says "the worshipful industry of the societal world. Disgraced by fame and by cynicism Nov 8, 2016." Despite drawing (literally) from similar pop-culture visual sources, this is a long way from Darger's mythos. Underwood's art is about the condition of contemporary America, made by a member of the fabled white working-class, from positions that are uniquely Underwood's own.
