Time(s) - 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Location
Atlanta Photography Group
Eyes on Atlanta:
ULTRARUIN
The Atlanta Photography Group is excited to present the next installment in our Eyes on Atlanta series. For this exhibition, we are featuring the works of 9 Atlanta artists, selected by artist photographer, Jody Fausett.
Photo: Travis Asher
Participating Artists
Travis Asher
Fredrik Brauer
Jenn Brown
John Charles Dean
Adam Forrester
Amanda Greene
Sarah Hobbs
Andrew Lyman
Dorothy O’Connor
Event Dates
Exhibition:
April 7 – May 8, 2026
In-Person Open House/Reception
April 9, 2026, 7-9pm ET
APG Gallery at Ansley Mall
1544 Piedmont Ave NE, #107, Atlanta, GA 30324
Located between LA Fitness and CVS Pharmacy
Curator Statement
ULTRARUIN begins inside the eighteenth-century obsession with ruins, when artists, writers, and architects wandered landscapes in search of collapse made beautiful. Painters like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable treated ruins as beautiful objects, fragments staged within nature, where decay became picturesque and time itself was aestheticized. These works did not mourn loss so much as seduce the viewer with it. Ruin was already a fantasy: a future imagined from the remains of the past reaching an ultimate state.
This exhibition extends that fantasy forward. It reimagines a future that might have been—a romanticized ghost that denies pain while fetishizing surface. Here, ruin is trapped in beauty. Who cares if you are rotten, as long as you are captured as beautiful forever?
Ruin is never neutral. It is always overstated, always part of a drama staged perpetually in the human imagination—half of which longs to build, and the other half to smash and level to the earth. Artists who linger over broken stones are not simply contemplating mortality; they are rehearsing desire, grief, domination, and denial. Ruins recall the glory of dead civilizations and the inevitable end of our own, while provoking dreams of futures born from destruction and decay. Bleak and alluring, a ruin is a fragment with a future: it will live on after us, even as it reminds us of a lost wholeness that never truly existed.
As Rose Macaulay wrote, ruins resemble “the extant fragments of some lost and noble poem.” They will always be less and less and less. And yet they persist. The exhibition turns from European romanticism toward an American ruin mythology. Atlanta appears as both subject and symptom: a city burned once in war, then burned again on celluloid—Hollywood reenactments leaving only charred columns, scorched earth, chaparral. Expensive taste burned black. What remains is a coarse radish in dirt. Faded grandeur and aching romanticism at the edge of a swamp. A city built on ruins and currently a grotesque version of itself—mechanic shops slick with grease and pinup girls on smudged posters replaced by thousand-room loft monsters connected to a single septic pipe. Facades crack. Seams tear. Everything strains under the weight of appearing new.
This is a “use once and destroy” landscape. Vibrant naturalism leaks through architectural fantasy. As Georg Simmel described, the ruin marks the moment when culture begins to slide back toward nature, when architecture’s upward striving finally gives way to gravity, corrosion, and entropy. What emerges is not meaningless destruction, but a new, legible form. ULTRARUIN occupies this unstable threshold. It is neither nostalgic nor purely mournful. Like contemporary mappings of ghost towns, bombed buildings, and abandoned infrastructures, the work treats ruin as a site of radical potential. Its fragmentary condition invites speculation rather than closure. The exhibition drifts through time—past, present, and speculative future—refusing the comfort of chronology.
This look persists because it promises escape: an excursion into fantasy where failure is aestheticized, collapse is erotic, and history becomes a surface. ULTRARUIN lingers inside that promise, exposing both its seduction and its violence. The ruin outlives us. It waits. It watches us imagine ourselves as the sole survivors—already too late, already ruins in rehearsal.
Jody Fausett
Jody Fausett was born in 1973 in Tate, Georgia. He studied photography in Atlanta, Georgia at the Art Institute of Atlanta and later moved to New York where he found work in fashion and portrait photography. In 2004, he returned to Georgia to focus on his personal art. Fausett’s photographs have been in various group shows in New York, New Orleans, Oregon and Washington, and he mounted his first solo show at the University of Southern Illinois, Department of Motion Picture and Film in Chicago. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Surface, Real Simple, Oxford American and Photo District News. His first book, Second Place, was released in 2007 through GHava Press and, that same year, Creative Loafing chose him for Critic’s Pick as Atlanta’s Best Photographer. He was chosen by Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles as one of Atlanta’s top ten tastemakers of 2009. Fausett’s photograph “Baby Powder” was the cover of Contemporary Annual, a British journal surveying photography around the world, and his multimedia piece “Suddenly, Last Summer” appeared on the cover of Art Papers. His work was also included in a lecture, “Out of the Ordinary: A Survey of Photographic Work by Atlanta-based Artists” at the High Museum of Art in 2000. In early 2011, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia recognized Jody Fausett as an up-and-coming local talent, and his work was shown in the corresponding Movers & Shakers: MOCA GA Salutes the Rising Stars of the Georgia Arts Scene at MOCA GA. Possible Futures also selected Fausett’s work for Atlanta Art Now’s first book, NoPlaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape, which explores the ways in which local Atlanta-based artists are tackling ideas of place in a complex world. His work is on the cover of the literary journal The Chattachoochee Review, and Oxford American has picked him for one of the top “New Superstars of Southern Art.” In 2023 Oxford American put his photograph “Wet Driveway” on the cover of the summer issue. In 2014 he was shortlisted for the Artadia Prize and Jody served on the steering committee for Idea Capital Grants, which rewards experimental art projects in Atlanta. His solo exhibition “Crush Velvet” was shown at the Morean Art Center in St. Petersburg, Florida and recently received a fellowship to VCCA.
Artist Biographies
Travis Asher
Travis Asher is an Appalachian artist and wayfaring observer of the American periphery. Drawn to the forgotten and the decayed, his photography explores spaces that exist in-between-places that breathe, sigh, and quietly endure beyond attention. His work reflects a deep connection to impermanence, memory, and the unseen, shaped by an Appalachian Gothic sensibility that finds beauty in what lingers after everything else has moved on.
Fredrik Brauer
Fredrik was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden but has been residing in Atlanta, GA since 2010. His work often considers the formal aspect of the built environment and its effects on our memory, mood, and individuality. Fredrik has been published all over the world and recent exhibitions include, the Edge Award Finalist Exhibition in 2021 at the Swan Coach House Gallery, Sandler Hudson Gallery in 2022, the “Temporary Art Center” in 2024, and the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in 2025.
Jenn Brown
Jenn Brown is a multi media artist and photographer based in Atlanta Georgia. She has a BFA in photography from Georgia State University.
She has attended artist residency programs in Salzburg, Austria, and Dole, France. In addition to her solo photography work, she has worked in collaboration with other artists including the art collective, True Heart Collaborations. Her photography work focuses on meaning and connection to particular places, exploring identity, the space time continuum and spiritual portals.
John Charles Dean
John Charles Dean is originally from Louisiana but has lived in Atlanta Georgia since 1996. He has both a BFA in art photography / art history, from the University of Arizona in Tucson and an MFA in art photography from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. In the mid 1970’s he studied contemporary art at Antioch College West in San Francisco. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s John studied photography with the internationally recognized artists, Todd Walker, William Larson, Larry Fink, and Esther Parada. In Arizona, he also took classes with the great American artists, W. Eugene Smith and James Turrell. He has photographed the landscape and ideas about the landscape through many permutations since the mid 1970s.
Adam Forrester
Adam Forrester is a writer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. His photography and expanded media works have been screened and exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the Historic Center of Kalamata in Greece, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Poland, Weinberg/Newton Gallery in Chicago, Soap Factory in Minneapolis, STOVE WORKS in Chattanooga, and as part of the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Contemporary. Most recently, he co-curated (Im)Posibilidades: Performance Art for Video at Ogden Contemporary Arts. Forrester earned an MFA in fiction from Georgia State University as well as an MFA in visual art from the University of Georgia. He lives with his wife and their dog in an old house with wavy glass window panes.
Amanda Greene
Amanda Greene is a photographer based in rural Georgia. She grew up in Atlanta and traveled west to study photography at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. After graduating Greene remained in the Los Angeles area for 13 years before returning “home” to Georgia in 2010.
Greene explores the use of color and the subtle moments of every day life in rural spaces. She works for editorial and commercial clients, as well as showing her personal projects in art spaces. Her work has been in various group shows, including: The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta Photography Group, The Swan Coach House Gallery, The Hambidge Center, The Lyndon House, Hathaway Contemporary Gallery, The Lola, and Southside Gallery.
Solo shows:
“Her Fragrance is Still Among Us” 2024, The Hudgens Center, Duluth, GA.
“Summertime Rolls” 2025, Sarah Shepherd Gallery, Larkspur, CA
“Covered Dish” 2025 Southside Gallery, Oxford, MS.
Greene’s work has been featured on The New York Times LENS blog, The Bitter Southerner and The Oxford American and she has published two books: Rejoice, 2019 and Peach, 2022. She lives in Danielsville, GA with her husband and two dogs.
Sarah Hobbs
An artist who uses photography and installation, Sarah Hobbs’s work is an ongoing exploration of the neurotic tendencies that exist in us all. She holds a BA in Art History and an MFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens. She lives and works in Atlanta. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Knoxville Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Sir Elton John Collection, among others. Hobbs’s work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA, and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been included in several shows across the country and abroad. Her first monograph, Small Problems in Living, was published in 2012.
Andrew Lyman
Andrew Lyman (Luxembourgish-American b.1993 Atlanta,GA) is a lens-based artist working with photography and writing to build an ongoing archive of his life. His work centers intimacy, consent, and the conditions under which images are made and shared. He lives and works in Atlanta. Lyman earned a BFA in photography and painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and an MFA in photography at Georgia State University. Lyman taught photography at Georgia State for six years from 2019-2025, and is now pursuing a degree in social work in addition to his practice of art and editorial photography.
Dorothy O’Connor
Dorothy O’Connor’s constructed, fantastical works often combine elements of photography, installation and public art. She has received grants from Possible Futures, FLUX, Forward Arts Foundation, Art on the Beltline, Crusade For Art, Fulton County Arts and Culture, City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs and others to present her installations as public art. In 2013, she was artist in residence at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville where she built and presented her installation, “Shelter.” She is a Hambidge Fellow and was part of the Hambidge Hive Collective in 2017. 2019 concluded with a solo show of her photography series, Scenes, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Ms. O’Connor’s work is part of the permanent collections at MOCA GA, Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fulton County Arts and Culture, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and is included in numerous private collections.
