Atlanta, Georgia - Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its fall group exhibition, Encounters on view from September 26 to November 29. What does it mean to stand before an image in a society that conditions us to skim, swipe, react and move on? Encounters resists the lure of passive observation, gathering film, photography, sculpture, painting and installations that interrupt the flattened cycles of contemporary looking. These works demand presence. Here, the creative act generates an encounter in its fullest sense: something to be met, something to be reckoned with.
Rather than overwhelm the senses or dictate a fixed emotional response, these works invite sustained attention and reflection. Extending across the physical, spatial, imaginary, engineered, bodily, and the emotional field, the artists in Encounters compose worlds that are neither wholly real nor entirely fictive, but calibrated hybrids designed to culminate in contact. Some practices take root in the geological, their surfaces marked by pressure, accumulation, and time-registering slowness rather than immediacy. Others are born of fabrication, calibrated through digital vision, symbolic logic, or mechanical precision-but resist technological bravado as a lone feat. Yet they are never held by a single register.
Meaningful forms of expression-here or elsewhere-rarely reveal themselves all at once. Their complexity unfolds gradually, offering something lasting in exchange for something from the viewer: time, attention, patience. This is the quiet cost of deeper encounters, of meaning that stays rather than flashes and fades. Here, reward awaits the observer who lingers, who looks with care, who comes back to look again.
In an adjoining gallery, Encounters will feature Hands Performance, a video work by multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome that draws from the vogue fem tradition, using hand movements to convey narrative and rhythm. Created in collaboration with Black Queer ASL interpreters, dancers, and motion capture technologists, the work transforms Newsome’s original poetry into a dataset of movement rooted in Black and Queer sign language. These gestures are animated through Being the Digital Griot, a non-binary AI developed by Newsome and first introduced in his 2022 exhibition Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory. The resulting film merges speculative visuals and kinetic performance with a layered soundscape of bass, claps, and glitches, articulating Black cultural expression as both data and embodied language.
Artists: Ben Steele, Chip Moody, Daniel Byrd, Jamele Wright Sr., Judy Pfaff, Kathryn Kampovsky, Letha Wilson, Michael David, Rashaad Newsome, Sergio Suárez, Rush Baker, and Sam Gilliam.