The exhibition title, Omnium Gatherum, is defined as a “miscellaneous collection (as of things or persons)”. Long delivers with a delightful huge pile of bright and cartoony imagery.  Stacks of mundane objects and body parts that are ubiquitous and unremarkable in themselves are assembled as a collection that is humorous and poignant.  Apple cores, wood piles, tv sets, push-pins, goofy eyeballs and a pile of fleshy toes are among the items in this exuberant depository of things. This pile of stuff, when so randomly and fantastically thrown together becomes a landscape of mental debris. Banal objects crammed into the junk drawer to be fished out when needed, or set aside in the garage for just in case, when collected together in Omnium Gatherum, accrue a bemusing history of daily life. Personal associations - memories, connections, emotions - are fired as we are invited to wander around in the pile.  

The exhibition will also include Long's drawings on paper. Long’s work addresses the human emotion of wanting, yearning, pining. His choreographed depictions of individuals expressing the emotive and physical transformation of time and location, are manifested in work ranging from mixed media drawings to animation. He considers the nature of human behavior with delicately executed, nuanced images of people in a state of transition. The drawings in ink, graphite and fresco plaster on paper, are derived at through a series of re-translations. Long makes original drawings of figures in movement then manipulates the original drawings, through tracing, stamping, copying and transferring them repeatedly onto the paper. In the process each generation of the original image is degraded, and at the same time new information is added. The final figures fade and shift, repeat, overlap, separate and blend into each other with wispy, broken and smudged lines. One thinks of dream sequences, time shifting, fleeting memories.

Sorts

Sorts, a part of Flux Projects,  is a sequential wheat paste mural + video installation with projections Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings (excluding Thanksgiving night)  

November 19 - December 16, 2017

710 Ponce de Leon Avenue adjacent to 8Arm restaurant

Long’s work explores longing and the physical activities that people undertake during periods of transition, loss, and searching. With Sorts, he creates a mental landscape that is a collection of collections, mental debris, emotional sortings, piles of compartmentalizations. Into this setting he imposes figurative phrases as metaphors for the psychological chores we perform. As a dynamic and constantly changing piece, the projections and drawn elements will evolve daily over the course of a month.

Technical direction: Project Awesome
Photography: Kevin Brown
Video: Justin Newton

For the installation A Graves Worth, the result of a surprisingly effective pairing between Atlanta dancer and choreographer T. Lang and artist George Long, the collaborators traveled together to Mississippi, where she, a black woman, and he, a white man, can both trace their families’ bloodlines.

A clear rectangular pillar, upon which the creeping image of roots is intermittently projected, holds soil gathered from each artist’s family land, and the surrounding space is swaddled in billows of thin translucent cloth that appear to show shifting images of clouds, vapor or perhaps ancestral spirits. (Though the accompanying materials make no mention of it, according to the docent in the gallery, the pillar also contains the ashes of Long’s mother.) With Medium opening just weeks after the racist rally that led to one woman’s death in Charlottesville, the latest in a string of violent and often fatal incidents contributing to a heightened sense of racial tension in the US, the efforts toward reconciliation symbolized by A Graves Worth deliver a viscerally potent blow to the viewer.

Inspired by Heather Andrea Williams’ Help Me Find My People: The African-American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, the book and choreography explore the seldom-told American truths of newly freed citizens, using the technology of their day — a newspaper advertisement — to find their family members. The series’ first installment, Post Up, premiered at The Goat Farm Arts Center in 2014. The second installment, Post Up in the House, was presented at the High Museum’s Mi Casa Your Casa installation. LIT Variations #1-11, the third installment, took place at various locations around the city. The fourth installment, POST, will be performed at Fort McPherson, March 9 through 25.

“As I began creating the 4th installment, I knew I wanted to choreograph a unique work on love, reconciliation and continue examining the world where the author Heather Andrea Williams leaves us in Help Me Find My People,” says Lang. “I experimented with generating movement that embraced a codified vocabulary; one that served as a portal to a past informed by a future already written.”

To bring this piece into being, Lang collaborated with visual artists George Long and David Baerwalde, lighting designer Andre Allen and dramaturge Michelle Hite. The work was performed in a dormant chapel in a former confederate military base in an effort to “create a space where we can question the effects of constructed institutions like church and state,” Lang said in a statement.

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There are three main elements to this piece, and each of them is an example of how information is translated. By information, I mean learned behavior, knowledge, emotional development, and wisdom.

The encyclopedia pages are from the Colliers 1967 volume I grew up with. I used them to create a collection of random intersections of ideas. The pages are placed next to and on top of each other in no order. The larger orange images were selected, in a stream of consciousness sort of way, from books as we took them apart. The image of the cornfield is an animated element. It refers to a personal narrative from my childhood.

One day at the lake, watching my son dance unfettered, seemingly unaware of what surrounded him, I had a few realizations — this could be the happiest he is in his life. I was also aware that we were watching each other, both interpreting what we observed. The free space that surrounded him became my own archetype or translation of happiness. I am capturing moments in time and creating generations of information, some of which is gained, some lost, and some reconfigured.

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LXXX YOU is a performance group led by artists George Long, Mike Stasny, and Adrian Barzaga. Utilizing party tropes as the medium, LXXX YOU along with a myriad of rotating artists, infuse entertainment with performance art to create temporary immersive experiences submerged in weirdness and absurdity.  

Bonfire was created in 2012 at Paco Das Arts, Sao Paulo Brazil

With "Give One's Eye Tooth For". Long is interested in exploring the fragile process of human transitions from one emotional state to another. He refers to the state of yearning as"emotional calisthenics".

George Long's new work addresses the human emotion of wanting, yearning, pining. His choreographed depictions of individuals expressing the emotive and physical transformation of time and location, are manifested in work ranging from mixed media drawings to animation. He considers the nature of human behavior with delicately executed, nuanced images of people in a state of transition. The drawings in ink, graphite and fresco plaster on paper, are derived at through a series of re-translations. Long makes original drawings of figures in movement then manipulates the original drawings, through tracing, stamping, copying and transferring them repeatedly onto the paper. In the process each generation of the original image is degraded, and at the same time new information is added. The final figures fade and shift, repeat, overlap, separate and blend into each other with wispy, broken and smudged lines. One thinks of dream sequences, time shifting, fleeting memories.