PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Golden Blizzard: A Retrospective (Late 2005 - Mid 2006)

June 1 - July 8, 2006
Opening Reception with the artists: Thursday, June 1, 6 to 9 pm
Castleberry Art Stroll: Friday, June 2, 7 to 10 pm

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce A Retrospective (Late 2005 – Mid 2006), a solo exhibition by Atlanta-based collaborative Golden Blizzard. This will be the collective’s first exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery.

Golden Blizzard is an Atlanta-based art collective currently made up of eight artists who work in a variety of disciplines. Golden Blizzard presented their debut solo exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA-GA) in December of 2005 and quickly followed with solo shows at Eyedrum and Young Blood Gallery. Among numerous projects in the coming months, they have been selected as an official feature of the “Affair at the Jupiter Hotel” art fair in Portland, OR, in September, and have a solo exhibition with Screen Arts in St. Augustine, FL, in November.

By the act of giving themselves a retrospective – whether the public demands it or not – Golden Blizzard celebrates a happy first-six-or-seven-months in the life of a small factory of artists, and amiably asserts the (perhaps not readily apparent) significance of a group which you can be forgiven for never having heard of.

In honor of their self-organized survey of new and nearly-new artworks at Marcia Wood Gallery, A Retrospective (Late 2005 – Mid 2006) will showcase a massive wall-painting representing a composite landscape of elements taken from drawings originally exhibited in their debut show at MOCA-GA; those original drawings will be installed within view. Prominent area arts critics and curators will author mock essays on the importance of Golden Blizzard to the artworld-at-large; these will be given pride of place within the exhibition. A suitably-monumental twelve-foot high stuffed-fabric portrait of Marcia Wood herself, in gold and gold-toned fabrics, awaits the viewer in the terrace gallery. At the heart of the group’s aesthetic is the ongoing series of collaborative drawings, a large suite of which make up the bulk of the exhibition.

Achieving an unlikely marriage of masculine and feminine elements, high and low artistic sensibilities, and melding more traditional media with such things as glitter, gel pens, Bedazzler and spray-tinsel, the artists of Golden Blizzard - all of whom also work autonomously as artists outside the group - similarly find inspiration in the tension between the self-asserting and ego-obliterating act of collective expression. As explained by Felicia Feaster in a cover article in Creative Loafing on March 4, 2006, the "cutely-cultish eight-member art collective ... somehow incorporate both the feminine yin of small furry animals with a masculine yang of oozing pustules, sex organs, blood and death."

Golden Blizzard is made up of Ellen Black, Errol Crane, Jennifer Kornder, Alexander Kvares, Ann-Marie Manker, Jordan Reece, Daniel Upton and Lydia Walls.