By Felicia Feaster

There are a number of reasons to admire the efforts of New York critic Franklin Sirmans to represent a cross-section of Atlanta artists for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s 2003 Biennial exhibition.

Sirmans has made an obvious effort – in an art world often hung up on young, trendy, Next Big Thing artists – to represent mature, culturally diverse and self-taught artists, as well as a range of styles and media, from drawing, sculpture, video and painting to formalist and conceptual work.

But the Catch-22 of showing such a broad range of artists and styles is how frustratingly scrambled this biennial feels. With its discordant mix, it’s often hard to get a good sense of the real connective tissue beneath Sirmans’ desire to be inclusive.

Sirmans has managed to sniff out an impressive number of Atlanta’s established and rising talents, including, among others Sara Hornbacher, Donald Locke, Hope Hilton, Michael Gibson, Kathryn Refi and Alex Kvares as well as some promising exploratory work from Emily Diehl and Rusty Wallace. But there is also a fair amount of mediocre work that may not be the best representation of either the artist in question (several artists are underrepresented with just one piece) or the local art scene.

Not that there aren’t serendipitous and inspired choices, For instance, the placement of Larry Walker’s and Eric Mack’s works on opposite walls of the main gallery draws out fascinating differences in their approach to the modern, post-industrial fracas . Walker’s street scenes littered with pornography, want ads, lost pet notices, advertisements and movie posters is a culture of disturbing overload – a bleating mania that suggests an artist critiquing the comparable effect on our brains.

But in the equally frenetic melee of Mack’s collages, the effect is quite different. In Mack’s cool, controlled grids, reminiscent of colorful roadmaps or computer circuitry, he suggest a completely different vantage.

Mack approaches the same mania with a sense of wonder. He displays a higher comfort level with technology and the psychedelic blur of a culture on overdrive, which underscores a distinctly generational divide between the two artists.

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