Angela West
Angela West's labor is to discover things- backyard thickets of uncultivated flora, empty intersections of minor streets, patches of lawn in shifting light- and stare at them, all eyes, for as long as it takes to understand, honor, and preserve these phenomena with a photograph. She makes the photographs because she is extraordinarily impatient with the fact that everything on the planet continually wears away and that every person inhabiting it has to die. This almost infuriates her, as does the fact that most people never look once at all the things in the world that rivet her own attention. The world blares like a brass band marching right past us but amazingly beneath our notice. With these photographs she saves some important sights, for a while, from human indifference and natural erasure, and takes pains to show them- see?- to the rest of us.
Angela West, MFA, over 30, living in downtown Atlanta, considers herself first and foremost to be a citizen, by birth, of Dahlonega, Lumpkin Co., Georgia, pop. (1990) 3,086. Everything in this show is grounded in the small place the artist grew up in, just as much of her previous work has been. What's interesting this time is that none of the landscapes looks site-specific to Dahlonega, in the way that the codes and values behind earlier series were deeply set there. These are familiar spaces that anyone in America could find themselves in. In the safety and quiet of a suburb (of a village) that looked and felt like a thousand others, the artist managed to preserve the capacities for sight and attention, reverence for being and love of family, that most people have worn out of them by the time they are old enough to rush away from home. These photographs show that she has still not gotten to the bottom of the simple juxtapositions- simple, that is, to us, who don't see as well- of tree and house, flower and branch, sunshine and shadow, that surround her true place in the world. -Richard Gess