EST ARS VITAE meaning living arts and more informally “Such is Life," presents abstractions inspired by biomorphic forms through drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture. Susan Cofer, the most established artist in the exhibition, has been exploring, in her decades-long practice, natural forms in her painstakingly created colored pencil drawings using only vertical lines of varying density. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally including a career retrospective, Draw Near, at the High Museum in 2012.
Artists Sean Abrahams’s and Zuzka Vaclavik’s works have also been collected by the High. Abrahams and Vaclavik both take a similar tack of filling what was the empty canvas or paper to a point of near saturation of forms: Abrahams using black and white pen drawings to create psychedelic landscapes, while Vaclavik’s work appears as a web of positive and negative shapes, softly colored and reminiscent of spring petals, branches, leaves and detritus after a rainfall.
Mike Goodlett, an artist from Wilmore KY, will be exhibiting for the first time in Georgia and at Poem 88. The curvilinear shapes of his cast assemblages evoke flower forms, internal organs, and wave patterns.
Hannah Adair is the newcomer having recently graduated from Georgia State University in 2015. A student of printmaking, her work in EST ARS VITAE shows her dexterity in creating hand-tinted lithographs with detailed additional drawing. These works evoke creation images: bodies or clouds emerging from the primordial mist. A common theme of nature’s smallest forms unite the artists’s works: from seed pods, sprouts and blossoms to Eve-like images emerging from the void, life and its beginnings permeate the show.