Inspired by her ancestors and southern black traditions, Atlanta artist Shanequa Gay created 15 new artworks titled "If I'm Not Here I Will Have to Be Invented". Her colorful works combining photography, painting and collage are now on display at Maison Hideoki on Peachtree Road until December 9. She also exhibited a set of photo collages at the Jackson Art Museum until December 23. The artist joined "City Lights" through Zoom host Lois Reitzes to share some of her inspiration for these vivid multidisciplinary works.

"'If I'm not here, I will have to be invented', it's actually just from thinking about history, the composition of a person, and fantasy and legend. My work is full of these things," Guy said. "We are obsessed with storytelling. If I remember correctly, we are the only creatures living in the narrative. So what does it mean to create something that doesn't exist and doesn't exist?"

Guy describes collage as a new but no stranger medium of her work, which is “immersed in the game”. When Gay was selected as the residence of Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the images in the "If I'm Not Here" series began to evolve and were limited to bringing a sparse set of media and tools. "I took paper, graphite, watercolor and some collage paper, and then I started playing," Guy said.

These images include a series of deconstructed and stylized photo portraits of young women and girls, which Guy took and later added layers of paper and paint to the photos. "These girls are actually photos I took in Perkson Park in 2018... I was actually doing research for another project and I met these kids everywhere," Gay said. "I started taking pictures of these girls, and when I was in Chattanooga, I saw these files and I thought,'Oh, this is so happy. This is so funny.'"

As a fan of fantasy, Guy cites movies and stories from her childhood, such as "Never Ending Stories" and "Willi Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" as a way of influencing her way of seeing the world, even her hometown Atlanta. "What does it mean to create a fantasy world in a place you really know?" Guy thoughtfully. "I am very interested in the legend of Atlanta that many people are interested in, as if Atlanta is the golden pot at the end of the rainbow.'If I can go to Atlanta, everything in my life will change.'" She affectionately referred to her city as " Atlanta" and full of visual signals in her work, for her, it summons the sensory identifiers of her city, such as hot sauce and watermelon.

Her use of photo portraits also marked the dark history of the city. Guy talked about the connection with the murder of children in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "If you look at the eyes of young ladies, they all have these huge eye features, and may be trapped in these boxes, unorthodox shapes. These eyes are actually images of the victim or his family," she said.

"What does it mean to carry this history with you?" Guy asked. "Whether they realize it or not, I am just thinking about the freedom of children to play in Perkson Park, and I am just thinking about the trap, or what it lacks. For those of us who grew up in the late 1970s, freedom 80 At the beginning of the decade, during the time when the Atlanta Child Murders...

Co-Op Art Atlanta will exhibit Shanequa Gay's "If I'm Not Here, I Will Have to Be Invented" at Maison Hideoki on December 9. For more information about this exhibition, please visit www.coopartatl.com/home/shanequagayexhibition