ATLANTA — Jackson Fine Art, a gallery moderate in size, is filled to the brim with paintings, collages, ceramics, photo transfers on aluminum, quilting, and, suspended overhead, cyanotype transfers on chiffon — not to mention the wallpaper. Despite the laundry list of media, a throughline extends across Shanequa Gay’s Gateway to the South, namely genre scenes depicting Black people in varying levels of abstraction. The exhibition text reveals that much of this imagery is culled from photographs taken by the artist’s maternal great-grandfather, James Battle, cementing this exhibition both firmly in the South and within the artist’s own ancestry. Through the agglomeration of techniques and displacement of familial history, Gay presents the South as a site of cultural diversity and historical reimagining.
