Just after 5 p.m., before doors officially open for that evening’s “A Celebration, With Love” reception, five or six of us are gathered inside Gallery FC. The magic hour sun is coming straight through the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling street-facing windows, and it’s turning the room — Dax included — a kind of gold. He’s standing in front of the paintings that make up “Love Was.”
The occasion is a reception on July 23 honoring Dax and his two companion exhibitions, both curated by Neda Abghari: “Love Was,” on view inside Gallery FC through July 30, and “Love Is,” on display in The CTR’s South Lobby indefinitely. Abghari, founder of The Creatives Project and ASHA Advisory, co-leads Gallery FC with A.R. “Coop” Cooper.
Dax starts with the weather.
“The weather’s very tropical,” he says, describing the months he spent painting outdoors in the Florida Everglades. “So I was fighting a lot of elements, and a lot of the elements even came through with these. You can see in some of them where the wind would blow and shoot things that way. If there were raindrops, I would leave it.”
Dax painted this body of work while staying with his mother and dealing with heartbreak. “I made these in Florida, going through a broken heart,” he says. “I was also trying to find time with my mother, who’s obviously getting older.” The paintings did double duty — work and release at the same time. “The work was very liberating,” he says. “I emptied my heart of a bunch of darker, deeper stuff.”
You can feel that urgency in how Dax describes making them. “These paintings I made with a furious rage of speed,” he says. “It’s kind of like cursive handwriting. You don’t put too much thought into it.” He calls the resulting energy masculine, aggressive — a contrast, he says, to “the bigger pieces I did over there, which I felt like I had a much more calm and feminine energy, much more like ballet.”
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One piece in the room, “Unseen Angels,” carries a different weight. Dax traces its roots to conversations with Abghari about mutual friends they’d each lost in Atlanta, among them the artist Radcliffe Bailey and b-boy Santisouk “Joy” Phrasavat. Those conversations were part of what set the whole exhibition in motion, “before we even knew what we were doing,” he says.
The hands behind the work
It’s worth pausing on who’s standing in front of these paintings. The name Dr. Dax has been part of Atlanta’s creative underground since the early 1990s, when he emerged as a visual force within the Dungeon Family — the collective behind OutKast, Goodie Mob, and Organized Noize — helping shape the city’s underground aesthetic through intricate hand styles. Decades later, his work has been recognized by the Museum of Graffiti, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, alongside collaborations with Nike, Adidas, Mercedes-Benz, and Red Bull.
We move next door into The CTR’s South Lobby, where “Love Is” hangs under a different kind of light. Dax made this work here in Atlanta, not the Everglades — “in a controlled environment,” he says, “with air conditioning and endless supplies.” The difference shows. “This has much more of a feminine, calm, patient energy,” he explains. He credits time spent with Abghari talking through the show for some of that shift.
The four paintings that make up “Love Is” share the room, but one is impossible to miss: a canvas the size of a school bus, painted on location over the course of a week, its surface built from overlapping lettering. Once your eyes adjust, you can see the message inside the piece: “Time is all we’re allotted in this life. Make it count,” a line drawn from a journal entry that belonged to Phrasavat.
“Love Was” closes July 30, a one-week extension past its original run. “Love Is” isn’t going anywhere; it remains on view in The CTR’s South Lobby indefinitely. If you want to see both halves of this conversation in the same visit, this week is your last window. Admission is free for both.
