Good Mourning of Age and Memory
James A. Enos and Jess Machacek
October 24 – November 14, 2023
Artist Talk & Opening Reception, October 24, 5-7pm
Bethea Gallery
FJ Taylor Visual Arts Center / Room 103
https://www.jessmachacek.com
https://jamesaenos.com
Good Mourning of Age and Memory is an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and print exploring sensorial notions of collectivity alongside metaphors of urbanization. Drawing from Enos and Machacek’sresearch, its primary concern is the push-and-pull of how materials are known. Bridging dialogue with regional geographers, geologists, and environmental scientists includes understanding the ephemeral as archives of erosion, erasure, and time. The exhibition suggests a wider phenomenological encounter with development and extraction is foundational to knowing of Southeastern United States.
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James A. Enos is an Associate Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Core at the University of Georgia whose research absorbs the built environment through architecture and critical practice in an effort to understand how public cultures respond to change. His interdisciplinary work looks primarily at port cities, materials circulation, and urbanization alongside issues of space and power. He holds a BS (Purdue University’s School of Technology, 2001), an M. Arch (The New School of Architecture, 2005), and an MFA (University of California San Diego, 2009).
Jess Machacek is an independent artist who produces domestic objects, paintings, and installations to propose notions of nature constructed by irony and familiarity. Her sculptural work plays with ideas of scale, modularity, and pattern in reference to artifacts blurred by modernism, industry, and commercial color systems. She received an MFA in Studio Art (University of Georgia, 2015) and a BFA in Printmaking (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2011).
Working collaboratively, they are interested in ideas of mark-making and pattern as surface translations of visual, social, and environmental thinking stemming from experiences of daily life.
