Starting from Friday, August 4th and running through the early winter, Sojourn’s own bartender & artist John Thomas Emory will be displaying four of his works in the indoor bar at Jet. All paintings are for sale, with details and purchasing available through his website and $100 of each sale being donated to ATL Solidarity to assist in defending the Weelaunee forest against its razing for the construction of Cop City. John will be bartending for the opening night & serving up a special Cynar Black Manhattan signature cocktail alongside our regular bar menu, with complimentary bites available.
About the Artist:
Reminiscent of the DIY aesthetics of underground media, this work relies on tried-and-true cut-and-paste equations combining printmaking and roughshod painting techniques. Made with mediums and surfaces more likely obtained at a hardware store, marks are made either spontaneously or with malice aforethought resulting in a heuristic and hastened application and process. A transfer of images over multiple analog steps further skews the perception and vantage point of the viewer. Images appear and disappear, painted over, leaving little but the ghost of that which came before them.
About ATL Solidarity:
The fight against ecological destruction and racialized violence in the US and beyond are inextricably linked. Today, climate collapse disproportionately affects disadvantaged groups such as Atlanta's Black communities. Rather than investing in solutions to the environmental crisis, governments are investing in heavier policing, especially of those disadvantaged groups. Atlanta's tree canopy is one of its main sources of resiliency in the face of climate change. Nevertheless, the police are set to bulldoze every inch of it. The period of planetary climate collapse that we are all living in will continue to pose urgent and unsettling questions to our species as we fight for dignity in a world of increasingly dangerous wildfires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and mass extinction.
Rather than address the problems as they present themselves, world and local leaders are hurling us into the fire. As we fight for a life worth living, the system seems prepared to prop up its petroleum-based economy with tear gas and lines of riot police. Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City is one part of a larger struggle dedicated to opening up a different path forward.