Fresh Loaf

Archives | RSS

  |  
Pin It
Share

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Uncategorized Greg Mike opens A Better View in Studioplex

Posted by Wyatt Williams on Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:32 PM

DSCN1175

Atlanta's newest gallery is the brainchild of artist and designer Greg Mike. Tucked into a crisp new loft in the Old Fourth Ward's Studioplex neighborhood, A Better View is a multipurpose space, housing a gallery on the ground floor and Mike's creative design agency upstairs.

The gallery's first show, a group exhibition of comic-inspired works by Marks Mothersbaugh, Mitch O'Connell, and Anthony Ausgang among others, opened this past weekend during Studioplex's art walk. The show is a sign of good things to come, updating Roy Lichtenstein's half-tone paintings into a fresh, contemporary context. Judging by this and their upcoming calendar, the gallery is tapping into West-Coast-styled, lowbrow aesthetic that's been largely missing from Atlanta's art scene, though it would fit right in with something like San Francisco's Fecal Face.

Mike is an accomplished artist in his own right (he has a solo show, Popstars and Cokeheads, opening at Butter Gallery in Miami later this month), but he was happy to talk about his role behind the scenes and getting this new gallery put together.

How did A Better View come about?

I used to do a lot of fashion design and I had a company called Carpe Denim. We grew and sold that about two years ago.  After that, I owned a tradeshow that started in Atlanta and moved to Miami called Trafik Tradeshow. It has, like, 300 contemporary apparel clothing lines.

Through all the connections that I made through the tradeshow, people started asking us to do consulting work. So, that’s how I got into the consulting side of things, but I was doing consulting and working these other guys, my three other business partners at the time. They ended up moving to New York and they got focused on other projects, so we all went our own ways.

I went to school for visual art and I’ve always been a visual artist. So I wanted to go in that visual art, creative lane than just being strictly fashion and, you know, high end runway crap. So, we split then and that's when I formed ABV to do consulting under that name. We’ve been working under that name for probably about a year, just doing commission-based client work and putting on shows, but now we finally have the space to do the storefront and gallery.

How old are you?

Twenty-eight.

That’s a lot to get done by twenty-eight.

[laughs] Yeah, thanks.

What’s your plan for the gallery?

We’ll be doing a different show each month with the opening on the last Friday of the month during the [Studioplex] art walk. The first four shows are all artists outside of the state, like this one, The Panelists, is sixteen different artists curated by this guy KRK Ryden.

So, you’ll be bringing in curators?

We’ll have guest curators and we’ll do some shit, too. Like, when I come out with a new body of work, I’ll do a solo show here probably. One of the designers that works with us does visual arts, so we’ll do his show here.

Seems like y’all have a sort of west coast style.

It’s funny you say that, because there’s an agency [Medicine Agency] that represents me in San Francisco for visual arts stuff. I went out there and I did my first solo show last year.

They knew that I’d been doing all this design work and whatnot and they had a similar concept. So, they were like, “Why don’t we work together and form a partnership?” Because of that, I’ve been able to work with them, utilizing their calendar to book some artists, too. It’s funny that you say that because they created a similar agency there, where they have a shop and their design studio is downstairs.

It was one of things, when we working on creating this, we realized that there isn’t anything like that in Atlanta. I mean, you have boutiques and you have design firms, but you don’t have a space that can be multi-functional for a gallery, event space, to sell clothing, and do design work upstairs.

At the end of the day, our goal is to form an alliance where we can launch an artist or a brand or a show or whatever and have it go from San Francisco to Atlanta to Miami to New York.

The Panelists, featuring work by Mark Mothersbaugh, Mitch O'Connell, and others, runs until June 20 at A Better View.

Tags: , , , ,

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this thread:
By Email
With RSS

Add a comment

Latest in Fresh Loaf

More by Wyatt Williams

Search Events

all events
concerts
restaurants
movie times

Search Fresh Loaf

Recent Comments

Top Commenters

Most Popular
Most Shared
Most Commented

© 2013 Creative Loafing Atlanta
Powered by Foundation