Exhibitions at Johnson Lowe Gallery: The Structure of Ruins by Rush Baker IV

Johnson Lowe Gallery is currently showing The Structure of Ruins, a solo exhibition by painter Rush Baker IV. It opened on September 30 and runs through December 19, so you've got plenty of time to catch it. The gallery is at 764 Miami Circle, Suite 210, in the heart of the Arts District.

Baker is a Washington, DC-born painter, and his work is as much about how a painting is built as what it actually shows. He doesn't just apply paint to a surface; he works with collage, digital manipulation, plaster, ceramic adhesives, and resin, and then puts the whole thing through repeated cycles of excavation and reconstruction. The surfaces end up recording the act of accumulation as much as the image itself. In his earlier work, he dealt with contemporary political conditions more directly, but these recent paintings approach history through the physical behavior of the materials. Erosion, compression, fracture, and repair become the formal structures that register broader social and cultural forces. He leans into that uncertainty, playing with the tension between destruction and reconstruction and using abstraction to shift preconceived ideas.

For Baker, the American landscape works as a site of political geography, and the Civil War remains a potent source of inspiration. He's careful to distinguish that inspiration from literal subject matter, though—he's unpacking the war's consequences rather than its events. Places like Fort Sumter, Atlanta, Stone Mountain, Savannah, and Charleston function as overlapping fields of historical pressure. If you're from around here, seeing Atlanta listed alongside those other sites puts the work in a local context that's hard to ignore.

The Structure of Ruins is one of the exhibitions on view at the gallery right now, alongside The Second Body. Admission is free, and the show runs through December 19 at Johnson Lowe Gallery, 764 Miami Circle, Suite 210.