Best Visual Artist (Emerging)

Bethany Collins' room-size installation of works on paper and chalkboard drawings stole the show at Dashboard Co-op's Boom City exhibit in February. Collins' minimalist artworks, which use text and erasures to communicate on ideas about race, play with the stunning shift of staring into the vast depth of space and then suddenly being switched to the minute flatness of language. She was a 2012-13 WonderRoot Walthall Fellow, an honor that culminated in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia last spring. Though still early in her career, the High Museum decided to acquire work by her for its permanent collection and exhibit it in the locally focused summer show Drawing Inside the Perimeter. Honors and accolades aside, Collins' precise and unnerving work makes her one to watch. www.bethanyjoycollins.com. less...

It's kind of a big deal when the High Museum decides to show a local artist's work. It's an even bigger deal when it decides to blanket the museum's exterior with it. In August, 350 feet of wall space surrounding Sifly Piazza was illuminated by Micah Stansell's five-channel sound and video installation The Water and the Blood, the result of his 2011 Working Artist Project award that also showed at MOCA GA last fall. Like 2010's Between You and Me and the search for the exceptional, his 2012 collaboration with gloATL, The Water and the Blood was a beautifully mellow pondering of memory. Stansell, who often collaborates with his wife Whitney, shows a particularly Southern knack for visual storytelling steeped in nostalgia that we haven't been able to forget. www.micahstansell.com. less...

Is it a coincidence that artist Gyun Hur's trademark technicolor lines of chopped cemetery flowers convey the urgency of a launch pad? Perhaps not. Ever since her solo show at Get This! Gallery in early 2010, Hur's been moving at warp speed: Last year she initiated (and was awarded a grant for) the "Stay Here in Atlanta" project, a series of studio visits and conversations with local artists to encourage them to, well, stay in Atlanta. In December, the 27-year-old Hur was awarded the inaugural and unprecedented Hudgens Prize, a $50,000 cash purse for a Georgia artist courtesy Duluth's Hudgens Center for the Arts. She was featured in MOCA GA's annual Movers and Shakers exhibition in early 2011, and last March, undertook a massive installation of her work at Lenox Square mall. Situated between Macy's and Sephora, Spring Hiatus blanketed a section of the mall's busy thoroughfare in razor-straight lines of saturated color, including psychedelic red, purple, blue, green and yellow. Hur paused throughout the painstaking installation to chat with shoppers and visitors and explain the ritual inspired by her mother's Korean wedding blanket. Hur's moving up fast, and leaving something beautiful in her wake. gyunhur.com. less...

Down here south of the 35th parallel, there's no shortage of peach-related imagery. But no one's quite got the angle on it like painter JIHA MOON. The Korea-born Atlantan not only brings out the erotic side of Georgia's favorite fruit, but throws in Microsoft butterflies, toxic clouds, surreal kimonos and airborne tree limbs swirling in the fantasy space of a postmodern Hokusai purgatory. Art spaces around the country – from Moti Hasson Gallery in New York to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts – have taken notice, and Atlanta's Saltworks Gallery made sure to bring Moon to a hometown crowd. We're sure it won't be long before she's orbiting around the rest of us mere mortals high in the art stratosphere. www.jihamoon.com. less...

Providing a welcome infusion of humor into the city’s art scene, FAHAMU PECOU was one of the standout artists in this year’s eclectic Talent Show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. With the humor of a comedian and the peacock attitude of a hip-hop star, Pecou produced a “60 Minutes”-styled mockumentary that helped create his own cult of personality. Pecou’s wry commentaries on the artist-as-celebrity also showed up this summer at Vaknin Gallery. We’re hoping this is just the beginning. The Contemporary demonstrated an interest in new blood and a fresh vision by welcoming Pecou to its board of directors.

www.fahamupecouart.com

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Winner of this year’s prestigious Santa Fe Prize for Photography, SHEILA PREE-BRIGHT is an enormously talented Atlanta Contemporary Art Center studio artist. She has created a host of revealing, stereotype-busting work examining the phenomena of the hip-hop fashion accessory of grills, the black middle class and black female sexuality, and she promises more fascinating peeks into contemporary identity to come.
www.sheilapreebright.com.

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