Review: Buy Local Celebrates, But Fails to Elevate, Rising Talent

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A typical exhibition at Emily Amy Gallery devotes most of its copious wall space to a fairly specific brand of decorative abstract paintings. In Buy Local: A Group Show Celebrating Atlanta’s Emerging Talent, the gallery broadens its scope by featuring a half-dozen artists whom the gallery touts as “rising young stars” of the Atlanta art scene. The result is an earnest but uneven attempt to cover all the aesthetic bases, in the end covering none.

First, the good news: Zuzka Vaclavik shows her chops with a set of paintings and drawings that channel the graffiti-covered walls of Cortona, Italy. Strange wild-style tags jostle with the biological microworld of a Petri dish and the psychedelia of Dorothy’s yellow brick road — as seen through Alice’s looking glass. Bursting with passages of unexpected color and linear grace, Vaclavik’s modestly sized works thrum with energy and the gritty urgency of urban beauty.

As published in Creative Loafing