SCAD MFA student P Seth Thompson embarked on a hero's journey for his thesis exhibition The Tannhauser Gate, opening Sat., May 19. Thompson, who's also the curatorial assistant to Michael Rooks, curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum, discusses his background and inspiration for the show, including Freddie Krueger, Blade Runner and quantum physics.

What's your background? How'd you get started making art?
I grew up with a mom as an artist. She worked at the Atlanta College of Art, and so I was constantly around college students and I think it made sense to me rather than the sports route or band route. On top of that, I was always really into fantasy and science fiction and horror films. Those things combined melded into my aesthetic in my photography.

What are some of your favorite horror films?
The one film that started it all for me was Nightmare on Elm Street 3. I saw it in the theater way too young — I was like 7 — and I was terrified at the beginning of the film and I wanted to leave but we didn't. At the end of it I was just blown away by the whole idea of being a dream warrior and hiding demons in your dreams.

Would you explain the title of your show, "The Tannhauser Gate?"
It's originally from Blade Runner and there's a scene that's, in my opinion, one of the best scenes ever in a film. At the end of the film, one of the characters recites this monologue before he dies and he mentions he's seen the Tannhauser Gate and he's referencing stargaze, where you can travel to other star systems, and so for me when I saw that and the combination of the music, the monologue, the acting, the visuals of the whole thing, it was just amazing.

For some reason, I don't know how I connected it, but I started to think about when I saw the Challenger explosion on TV when I was in first grade, 1986. How that was so impactful because up to that point I understood television to be fake, so anything that existed in television didn't exist in our world. And when the Challenger exploded, and my teacher was crying, it was so confusing because I didn't know why she was crying. And then I realized that the explosion actually happened and the people were all dead. So kind of like this metaphor, at that moment this gate opened up between our world and the television and the image.

A gallery and design agency with a street art bent, A Better View, aka ABV, opened its doors two years ago in an Old Fourth Ward Studioplex loft. Since then, it's featured more than 100 local, national, and international artists, including Ola Bad (Atlanta), Mark Bode (California), Claw Money (New York City) and Remed (France), as well as a monthly Drink & Doodle night for more than a year.

On the design side, owner/artist Greg Mike's clients have included rapper Asher Roth, producer/sonwriter Dallas Austin, New Belgium Brewery, Cee-Lo Green and recently Volkswagen.

To celebrate its anniversary, ABV opens Greyscale Friday night from 7-11 p.m. with music from DJ Martina McFlyy and works by Greg Mike, Ash Lethal, Trey Moseley, Ola Bad, AC Bananas, Wolfdog, Jert, Phillip Oliver, Toobz, Catlanta, Skie, Tindel, and more.

ABV's Creative Director and Owner, Greg Mike, recently took some time from preparing for Greyscale to talk to CL about ABV's first two years.

What is the premise of the upcoming Greyscale show, and what artists will be featured in it?
Since we are celebrating our second year, we thought it would only be right to do a group show based off of two colors — black and white — and all the values they produce in between. The show will feature 17 visual artists and one videographer: Ash Lethal, Trey Moseley, Ola Bad, AC Bananas, Wolfdog, Jert, Phillip Oliver, Toobz, Shingo Brown, Skie, Ted Murphy, Catlanta, Tindel, Brad Johnston, Andrew Litten, Will Mitchell, Chris Birdsong and myself.

On May 11, the Havana Biennial will open its 11th edition in Cuba. For the first time in its 28-year history, an American curatorial team will be part of the official program. That team is made up of Atlanta's Spelman Museum of Art director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2008, the pair co-curated and presented Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, which assembled 48 works by 44 black women film/time-based media artists in a smart examination of an overlooked group of art-makers. The show took home a Best of Atlanta award from CL that year for "Best art exhibit in a museum," and was nominated for an Association of International Art Critic's award in digital media and video. Havana Biennial director Jorge Fernández was also a fan and invited Brownlee and Oliver to revisit the exhibit for the 11th event. Brownlee and Oliver spent five months retooling the show - renamed Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded 2.0 - to include 8 works by Maren Hassinger, the collaborative artist team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Lorna Simpson, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. Brownlee discusses her time in Cuba and the "Why now" of involving an American curatorial presence in the Biennial's (one of the longest-running in the world) official program.

How did the opportunity arise to be one of the first American curators in this Biennial?
The project really started many, many years ago. Valerie Cassel Oliver [senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston] and I worked on the exhibition, Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded. From everything we could see, there were so many examples where black women artists were just not included in the dialogue about this fundamental and important medium, and we set about the task of really examining that and looking at the works that had been created using various platforms, various mediums.

I took a group to Havana last year and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who was in that first show, was our guest host, and it was amazing. We had the opportunity to do a lot of behind-the-scenes things, like meet artists and do studio visits. She introduced me to a number of people, one of them being Jorge Fernández who is the director of the Biennial. We remained in touch and had a number of conversations and received an invitation to submit a proposal. For a number of reasons that were primarily based on logistics, organizing a large retrospective didn't seem to fit the bill. But we certainly wanted to have a longer conversation about this project, Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded, which he loved. The opportunity to revisit that project came about, and we explored a number of ways that it could be in alignment with this sort of larger framework and theme of this biennial.

So how are you adapting it?
We had 44 artists in the original show, and certainly taking all of them and presenting all of their work would have been amazing; it would have just been phenomenal because we didn't feature anyone in that show that we weren't really passionate about their work and believed in it. But the reality of finances and space hit us very, very hard. We did a number of things in terms of our first pass. We looked at things ranging from the reaction of viewers in our respective spaces (it was first presented here and at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston); narrative, because we wanted this to be accessible, we didn't want to include narratives that were not going to be understood. I can think of three examples of works that I am very, very passionate about but it wouldn't have the same reception [in Cuba] because of the amount and the details of the narrative that were included.