ATLANTA, GA.- Atlanta Contemporary announces Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language, a group exhibition curated by Karen Comer Lowe. The exhibition examines how language transcends the written word to become something felt, lived, and carried within the body. Opening February 1, 2026, the exhibition features four artists whose diverse practices—spanning painting, sculpture, film, and installation—reveal language as an active force shaping identity, memory, and experience. Unbound Narratives joins the featured exhibition, Georgia Women to Watch 2026: A Book Arts Revolution, which celebrates the book as an artistic medium, showcasing five innovative Georgia artists who are redefining what books can be.
Unbound Narratives brings together Bethany Collins, February James, A'Driane Nieves, and Gabi Madrid, artists who draw from literature, personal writing, and historical documents to transform text into physical form. Their work invites viewers to consider how stories, whether inherited, written, or internalized, shape our understanding of ourselves and our relationships to others.
Bethany Collins (Chicago, IL) returns to Atlanta with foundational works to her artistic practice. This work anchors the exhibition with her investigation of linguistic instability. Unbound Narratives features paintings and drawings from her White Noise and Erasure series, in which Collins fragments, repeats, and erases text from historical documents, patriotic songs, and reference materials, exposing language as a site of tension that prompts critical inquiry into belonging, cultural memory, and national narratives.
February James (Washington, D.C.) expands her psychologically nuanced portraiture into stop-motion animation with All of My Stuff and All of Your Stuff Too, premiering in Atlanta. Inspired by Ceanne DeRohan's Original Cause I: The Unseen Role of Denial, James investigates marginalized emotional states including fear, longing, shame, and guilt, sculpting and animating painted figures in a ritual of reintegration that transforms the unseen into the visible.
A'Driane Nieves (Greater Philadelphia Area) engages text through gesture and movement, creating abstract works and soft sculptures informed by the writings of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, bell hooks, and Alice Walker. Using vivid color and expressive mark-making, Nieves maps internal landscapes shaped by healing, transformation, and the lived experiences of Black women, positioning language as a guide navigating between vulnerability and resilience.
Atlanta-based interdisciplinary artist Gabi Madrid extends the exhibition into the museum's atrium with Mourning After, a series debuting as part of Unbound Narratives that will remain on view throughout 2026. Madrid incorporates elements of an antique bed frame, associated with intimacy, vulnerability, and personal history, as the foundation for text-based sculptural installations. Words drawn from private journaling are inscribed onto these objects, establishing a dialogue between internal experience and material form. Informed by personal history and the cultural context of the Me Too movement, the dismantled bed functions as witness to transformation, holding space for both release and reclamation.
Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language is free and open to the public February 1 – May 17, 2026. The Opening Reception will take place February 5
