August 17 – September 29, 2024
How to Measure an Ocean: James Enos and Jess Machacek
Curated by Jon Swindler
Reception:
Saturday, August 17, 6-8 PM, 2024
ATHICA’s early Fall 2024 exhibition How to Measure an Ocean presents the work of the artistic and life partnership of James Enos and Jess Machacek. A site-specific installation featuring large free-standing sculptures and wall-based reliefs and objects combining print and mixed media, the exhibition explores complex patterns and textures as sensorial metaphors for describing atmospheric variation. Enos and Machacek use drawing, sculpture, and print to resign space for translating sea-land-climate processes beyond grasp. Working and traveling collaboratively, they are interested in mark-making and surface registration as means for recording glimpses of waves, volcanic activity, and physical energy. For them, these elements are encoded with emotive questions for how time and memory are sustained by technological processes that create abstractions of stillness from constant change.
Curator Jon Swindler observes that the artistic team of Enos and Machacek “bring a full palette of observation, technique, and intellectual inquiry to this body of work, animating the gallery with their thoughtful and beautiful expression.”
The exhibition results from ATHICA’s Annual Call for Entries, which provides opportunities for individual artists to exhibit their work at ATHICA and its satellite location, ATHICA@Ciné. Selected by the ATHICA Exhibitions Committee with additional curation by Exhibition Committee member Jon Swindler
More About the Artists 
James Enos is an interdisciplinary artist whose research and teaching engages issues of representation and space in an effort to understand how public cultures respond to change. His current work looks at the personal-to-planetary futures of memory, urbanization, and energy.
Jess Machacek is an independent artist who produces domestic objects, paintings and installations to propose notions of nature constructed by irony and familiarity. Her sculptural work plays with ideas of scale, modularity, and pattern in reference to artifacts blurred by modernism, industry and commercial systems.
Working collaboratively, they are interested in a nexus of visual, social, and environmental themes stemming from experiences of materiality that are at once physical and conceptual.
Enos Website: james-enos
Machacek Website: jessmachacek.com
Machacek IG: @jessmachacek
Team CV: Enos_Machacek_CV-24
About the Curator
Jon Swindler is Professor of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens. He holds a BFA in studio art and art education from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas and an MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
How to Measure an Ocean is sponsored in part by The James E. and Betty J. Huffer Foundation, The Georgia Council for the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts.
Press Release: https://mailchi.mp/athica/enosmachacek