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Visual Arts
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by Bill DeYoung | bill@connectsavannah.com
Atlanta artist Christina Bray’s paintings are still–lifes that tell stories – not in words, not in the emotion or pain in someone’s eyes (there are no people on her canvases), but in an eerily invoked memory of place. On view through Sept. 9 at the Armstrong Atlantic State University Fine Arts Gallery, Bray’s Street Journal: An Exhibition of Documentary Paintings chronicles what the artist likes to call a kind of photojournalism. She photographs places that, for her, have some sort of spiritual historical aura. Then she paints – in acrylics – from the photos. “For me, photography is just a completely separate artistic process than painting,” Bray, 40, explains. “And it’s something that I really don’t have much training in. I go out there like a
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tourist, doing little snapshots, and then I certainly embellish when I do the paintings. I’ll take parts of the photograph that I think need maybe a little bit more contrast or what have you, and sort of exaggerate that in the painting.” Bray, who holds Master’s degrees in both Fine Arts and Theological Studies, focuses on places and objects that she feels might well have “traumatic histories.” Some of the paintings depict the abandoned asylum at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. “I’m not trying to give people the creeps – if I was, I could really exaggerate,” she explains. “And I’ve seen paintings that people have made of mental hospitals, with crazy colors, stuff that to me looked like Halloween decorations. But I don’t think it needs that. I think it’s creepy enough just naturally.” Other pieces include graffiti–covered buildings she’s run across in Atlanta’s deeply urban areas. “I’ve always liked abandoned buildings,” Brays says. “I’ve always thought there was something beautiful about the sort of decay, and the spookiness of them.” CS
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“The main building of the abandoned Pullman Rail Yard complex, in Atlanta. I try to preserve the graffiti in the way that the writers created it, because I’m treating these paintings as documentaries. I thought about creating my own graffiti, but if I wanted to really go towards the documentary aspect, then I had to get it as accurate as possible. You could go to that building, and you’d recognize it immediately. The east line of the MARTA train goes right by that building.”
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AUG 24-AUG 30, 2011 | WWW.CONNECTSAVANNAH.COM
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