The film I co-directed, Crisis of Substance, about the opioid crisis in Georgia won a Southeast Emmy in the Health/Medical - Long Form Content category.

If you’d like to see the film it’s now available on PBS here.

Jared Dawson is The Church of Lavonia Elberton included in Season 8 Episode 805 of REEL SOUTH.

Premieres May 8, 2023

After Jared Dawson’s family forced him out of his childhood home because of their staunch religious convictions, he discovered his alter ego as a radical drag performer. As “Lavonia Elberton,” Jared navigates a new sense of belonging and family within the LGBTQIA+ community of Atlanta.

Watch film here.

Last year I co-directed a feature film about the opioid crisis in Georgia. The film was nominated for an Emmy SE in the Health/Medical - Long Form Content category.

If you’d like to see the film it’s now available on PBS here.

I have a flash fiction piece, “The Bottom,” out in February’s The Airgonaut

APG's Airport 2022

Exhibition Dates: September 22, 2022 - January 25, 2023

Location: Main Atrium at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Juror: Lisa Volpe

In 2020, I co-directed a music video with Steve Bransford of Terminus Films for Chuck Leavell and BMG. The music video, “Tumbling Dice,” can be seen on its own here, but if you want a little more context, take a look at the recently released feature length documentary Chuck Leavell: The Tree Man, which also features the full music video. Watch the feature film on Amazon here.

Tell Me a Story: Documentary and Street Photography 2022

Exhibition Dates: September 13, 2022 - October 13, 2022

Opening Reception and Artist/Juror Talks: September 15, 2022 6pm - 9 pm

Juried by Henry Horenstein

Atlanta Photography Group
1544 Piedmont Road NE, Suite 107
Atlanta, GA 30324

Last year I had the opportunity to film a little b-roll in my hometown of Columbus, Georgia for a pair of wonderful filmmakers, Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren of Field Studio. Their film, Picturing the Obamas is out now on the Smithsonian Channel. Please have a look and enjoy this wonderful film!

SOUTHERN EXIGENCY – ft. Nydia Blas, Jeremy Bolen, Benjamin Britton, Adam Forrester, Sonya Yong James, Casey May McGuire, Kelly Taylor Mitchell, Jiha Moon, Tim Short, and Cosmo Whyte

February 4 – March 5

Exhibition Reception: Friday, Feb. 4, 5-8pm

The Anderson and VCUarts are pleased to present Southern Exigency, an exhibition of ten Atlanta artists, organized and curated by the students of the Fall 2021–Spring 2022 Applied Curatorial Practices class. Representing four distinct School of the Arts studio and academic majors, the four student members of the class have worked tirelessly over the past seven months—to provide a glimpse into the power and promise of Atlanta, Georgia’s contemporary art scene.

This exhibition is organized and curated by the members of The Anderson’s Applied Curatorial Practices course: Sakina Ahmad, Cate Duckwall, Julia Park, and Kayleigh MacDonald.

From the curators:

Southern Exigency features ten Atlanta artists whose media-spanning works interrogate place, familial roots, memory, and physical land. Some works delve into the rich world of memories, often passing through portals and entering dreams or transformed realities. Others interrogate our relationship with the land and what we miss—or even look away from—that lies just under the surface. The power of storytelling coupled with radical vulnerability is evident throughout as each artist confronts themself and their environment, leading to the emergence of reborn narratives and deepened understandings. 

Connected, the works compose a varied and rigorous picture in response to and in conversation with the exigencies of the contemporary American South. How do we trace the places we have been while defining the urgent demands of the present and future? How can we navigate ourselves through the unknown, making the process a practice? What radical arrival(s) might we meet and what might we heal along the way? Through a critical examination of roots, memories, and histories, the artists in Southern Exigency posit how we might move into complexity, make the invisible visible, and open ourselves to the fullness of time and place. 

WORKS FROM RESIDENTS ‘21

Curated by Katie Hargrave and Christina Renfer Vogel
Dec 3, 2021 - Jan 15, 2022

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (MAIN GALLERY):

Adam Forrester, Amanda Lechner, Ana Meza, Anne Herbert, Bradley Marshall, C.C. Calloway, Daniel Luedtke, Deepanjan Mukhopadhyay, Devin Balara, Gyun Hur, Kate Robinson, Liz Miller, Mandy Cano Villalobos, McLean Fahnestock, Sean Fader, and Zack Rafuls.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (RESIDENT SALON):

Mika Agari, Natalie Baxter, Tom Beale, Kris Bespalec, C.C. Calloway, Mandy Cano Villalobos, April Childers, Sean Clark, David Court & Carolyn Lambert, Douglas Degges, Katherine Dirscoll, McLean Fahnestock, Adam Forrester, Rose Harding, Anne Herbert, Tristan Higginbotham, Gyun Hur, io, Sonya Yong James, Klypi, Amanda Lechner, Stephanie Loggans, Daniel Luedtke, Laura McAdams, Mitch Miller, Peyton Peyton, Zack Rafuls, Ryder Richards, Kate Robinson, Victoria Sauer, Tom Scicluna, Allison Spence, Terry Thacker, Siebren Versteeg, Masha Vlasova, and Brian Zimmerman.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (LOCAL SALON):

Ron Buffington, Angela Dittmar, Matthew Dutton, Jessi Hamilton, Jodi Hays, Libby Michael, Kirby Miles, Raquel Mullins, Jon Newman, Erica Scoggins, Christy Singleton, Saria Smith, and Will Sutton.

CURATOR BIOS:

Katie Hargrave

Katie Hargrave is an artist and educator based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In her art practice she considers collaboration to be key and she explores the construction (and destruction) of systems, symbols, and institutions within the US. Hargrave holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, MA from Brandeis University, and a BFA from the University of Illinois. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Wiregrass Museum of Art (Dothan, AL) and selected group exhibitions at The Front (New Orleans, LA), Neon Heater (Finley, OH), the Wienberg/Newton Gallery (Chicago, IL), and the 2021 Atlanta Biennial (Atlanta, GA). Hargrave has been an artist in residence at Epicenter (Green River, UT), Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts (Raybun Gap, GA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Signal Fire (Portland, OR). She is a member of the collaborative groups “The Think Tank that has yet to be named”, “Like Riding a Bicycle”, and collaborates regularly with Meredith Lynn. She currently serves as an associate professor and foundations coordinator at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. 

http://katiehargrave.com

Christina Renfer Vogel

Based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Christina Renfer Vogel holds an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.  Rooted firmly in perceptual painting, her work reflects direct encounters and everyday exchanges in her environment. Drawing from the quotidian and familiar, Vogel navigates the space between seeing and describing, interpretation and invention. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN), inclusion in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), and group exhibitions at the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC) and LABspace (Hillsdale, NY). Vogel has participated in artist residencies including the JSS in Civita program (Civita Castellana, Italy), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), and the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). She is a recipient of a Lighton International Artists Exchange Program grant and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, among other awards. Vogel currently serves as an associate professor of painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

https://christinarenfervogel.com/

RSVP for Opening of Virtual Remains curated by TK Smith here.

On view from February 20, 2021 - August 1, 2021

“Offering fertile ground for speculation, experimentation, and failure, the Atlanta Contemporary’s Project Spaces are a departure from the traditional white cube. Virtual Remains bridges marginal and unconventional spaces to examine how contemporary artists are experimenting with technology to contend with flawed and fragmented archives. Danielle Deadwyler, Shane Dedman, Adam Forrester, and Artemus Jenkins are Atlanta-based artists who embrace the flaws and gather the fragments to create works of art that tell personal and communal histories in innovative and intuitive ways. Each artist tends to their own interdisciplinary repositories of ephemera — documents, film, and audio— that they then redact, manipulate, and fabricate to uncover the truths that lack material evidence.

Deadwyler offers a multimedia installation that incorporates performance, video, and sculpture to intervene on the histories of the Atlanta railway corridor by unearthing the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Black laborers who worked to construct it. Dedman debuts a trilogy of experimental films that contemplate loss of one’s personal archive as a rite of passage or as tragedy. Forrester’s installation involves a documentary film and a collage of archival and fabricated documents that blur the boundaries between truth and lies. Jenkins presents a series of videos that rely on his process and experience as a filmmaker to speculate on the future of memorialization when the most critical remains are digital.

The works presented in Virtual Remains are malleable and evolving accumulations of the artists’ continuous labor, introspection, research, and engagement with their communities. Exacerbating the tensions between memory and history, truth and myth, the exhibition privileges the experiential to simulate what feels most true, instead of literal truths. Together, the artists engage in a non-linear, fragmented, and inconclusive conversation on absence, memory, and the fidelity of technology.”

-TK Smith, Curator of Virtual Remains

In this portrait film, we meet Jared Dawson, an Atlanta-based drag queen and spiritual leader, and learn how his family’s religious convictions forced him out of his own childhood home, and how he has navigated a new sense of belonging and family within the LGBTQ+ community of Atlanta.

CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS

Archive(d)

solo exhibition at whitespec

January 31 – March 14

Opening Reception: Friday, January 31 | 7-10 pm

SOME MILLION MILES Screens at NH Docs in New Haven, Connecticut

Co-Directed with Jared Ragland

Produced by Indie Grits Labs as part of the 2019 Rural Project



Saturday, June 1st at 1:30 PM 

Community Program Room, New Haven Free Public Library, 133 Elm Street, New Haven, CT

SOME MILLION MILES Premieres at Indie Grits Film Festival

Co-Directed with Jared Ragland

Produced by Indie Grits Labs as part of the 2019 Rural Project

Archive to screen at New Orleans Film Festival as part of the Cinema Reset portion of the festival.

Projections and Installations Schedule at the Contemporary Arts Center–
Monday, October 15 – Wed, October 17 (12:00PM – 7:00PM)
Thursday, October 18 – Wed, October 24 (10:00AM – 10:00PM)

More information found here.

RESTORING THE ARCHIVES BUILDING: AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM FORRESTER

Andrew Wasserman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Atlanta Studies is an open access, multimedia web-based journal published by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. We publish articles, blog posts, book reviews, and videos from the scholars, writers, artists, and activists who are writing the next chapters in our city’s story. Examining Atlanta from a wide range of perspectives, we offer thoughtful analyses of the metro region’s past and present for a public audience. We aim to be critical when addressing Atlanta’s problems and a tad boosterish when assessing its possibilities. We believe a city is no better than its scholarship, and we hope you’ll tune in and take part. 

A digital publication of the Atlanta Studies Network, Atlanta Studies features innovative scholarship that takes advantage of the Internet’s capabilities to deliver audio, video, images, text, and data to facilitate new ways of organizing and presenting research. Atlanta Studies archives all of its publication materials within Emory’s Libraries and Information Technology Services (LITS) and is committed to providing a stable digital presence for content.

Read the full article here.

Archive to be exhibited at Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach.

https://www.digitalgraffiti.com

Archive will screen Wednesday February 21st from 2:15 - 3:30.  See full Video Art Schedule Below.

WEDNESDAY

PART  I     time 14:15 – 15:30

1. River Crab – Karolina Mełnicka (PL)
2. Confidente (Confident) – Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes (BRA)
3. The Loop – Diana Galimzyanova (RUS)
4. From This Side Of Space To The Other Side Of The Signal – Benjamin Rosenthal (USA)
5. Archive – Adam Forrester (USA)
6. Dekonstrukcja Osobowości – Agnieszka Konarska (PL)
7. Niebo – Kolektyw DA (PL)
8. Fight of bulls – Tushar Waghela (IND)
9. Bitterschokolade (Dark Chocolate) – Beate Höller (D)
10. Kompozycja Przestrzenna – Marta Krześlak (PL)

THURSDAY

PART  II     time 9:30 – 11:00

1. To be – Farzaneh Omidvarnia (DNK)
2. Untitled (Torso) – Nataša Stearns (USA)
3. The Trader – Manuel  Alvarez Diestro, Sergio  Belinchon (ESP)
4. Greetings from Atlantis – Hanna Kaszewska (PL)
5. 2084 – Jan Chramosta (CZ)
6. Genesis – Abtin Mozafari (IRN)
7. DYSPLA_washed up babies – Lennie Varvarides, Kazimir Bielecki (UK)
8. Vernunft & Triebe – Bennet Meyer (D)
9. Clip Santé – Alexandre Fatta (CAN)
10. Parking Lot Attendant – Charlotte Clermont (CAN)
11. Phobia –  Małgorzata Andrys (PL)
12. Wspieramy Mariana – Mariusz Moscicki (PL)
13. At the window, on the bed, behind the door – Erika Roux (NLD)
14. Jak Wydoić Krowę – Adam Żądło (PL)
15. Instrucciones para hacer un film en un país subdesarrollado (Instructions for making a film in an underdeveloped country) – M. Dianela Torres (MEX)

FRIDAY

PART  III     time 9:30 – 11:00

1. Natural disasters – Antti Polojarvi (FIN)
2. Despondent – Marek Vajduliak (SVK)
3. Celebrity – Khalil Charif (BRA)
4. #allthatissolidmeltsintoair – Jonathan Palomar (CAN)
5. The Islands – Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh (TWN)
6. How Art You? – Kimberly Berckmoes (BEL)
7. Moonland – Martin Janoušek (CZ)
8. Świtezianka – Tomasz Herman (PL)
9. Thank You – Karolina Nieduza (IND)
10. Nabożeństwa Majowe do Najświętszej Maryi Dziewicy – Piotr Piasta (PL)
11. K – Rick Niebe (ITA)
12. Schody – Angelika Cebula (PL)
13. Virtual Actors In Chinese Opera – Tobias Gremmler (HKG)
14. Fogette – Jorge Mario Zuleta (CRI)
15. Sztuczny Produkt Kultury – Martyna Wolna (PL)

Opening: Thursday, January 26, 2018 @ 6:00 PM

On View: January 27, 2018 - July 1, 2018

What would happen if an exhibition never stopped? Since it began in 1993, with this question being asked by Hans Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, do it has become the longest-running and most far-reaching exhibition ever to have happened – constantly evolving and generating evermore relevant new versions of itself. do it has toured to venues from New York to Manchester, Budapest to Salt Lake City, and Kosovo to Moscow. And now, from January 26 to July 1, 2018, do it is opening at the Mobile Museum of Art.

Mobile Museum of Art presents its own reinterpretation of do it with the help of regional artists and community groups. The exhibition will include Bruce Larsen interpreting the score of Nicolas Paris, Phillip Counselman creating his version of Yoko Ono’s “Wish Peace” (1996), Colleen Comer enacting a Tracey Emin instruction, a Sol Lewitt piece performed by the Spring Hill College Art department, and many more.

artists:
Luke Andrianopoulos
David Armentor
Susie Bowman
Megan Cary
Conz 8000
Brendon Cooke
Colleen Comer
Phillip Counselman
Chris Cumbie
Ramon Deanda
Casey Downing
Jenny Fine
Susan Fitzsimmons
Adam Forrester
Lucy Gafford
Stacey Holloway
Trey Lane
Brock Bernard Larsen
Bruce Larsen
Jimmy Lee
William Legg
April Livingston
Kimberly Lovvorn
Emilee Luke
Richard McCabe
Kimberly McKeand
Lillian McKinney
Micah Mermilliod
Dan Munn
Jared Ragland
Rikki Rhodes
Samantha Seghers
Amanda Solley Wilson
Dixon Stetler
Wanda Sullivan
Matilde Tellaetxe
Matthew Hopson-Walker
Keith Wall
Lauren Woods
Rachel Wright

with:
AIDS Alabama South
Alabama Contemporary Art Center
Alabama School of Math and Science
Mobile Arts Council
Spring Hill College
The Salvation Army
University of Mobile
University of South Alabama

The origin and transformation of do it reflects the necessity of exploring collaboration and shared authorship in a constantly evolving art world. The project’s impetus is rooted in the extraordinary effects of globalization on curating and artistic practice in the 1990s, a time that witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the geographies of contemporary art. Twenty years later, do it has taken place in 60+ venues worldwide and includes nearly 400 artists from across the globe, giving new meaning to the concept of an exhibition in progress, while offering infinite creative possibilities for participating audiences everywhere.

do it is an exhibition conceived and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. do it and the accompanying publication, do it: the compendium, were made possible, in part, by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and with the generous support from Project Perpetual and ICI’s International Forum and Board of Trustees.

Archive will screen at this year's Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York.

Cinépolis Chelsea
260 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

November 1 - 5, 2017

Archive will screen as part of Atlanta's 4th Annual Y'allywood Film Festival.

October 9 - 15, 2017

7 Stages Theatre
1105 Euclid Ave N
Atlanta, GA 30307