When Mary Stuary Hall and Meredith Kooi discovered their shared interests in mapping, place-based art, radio, listening, and book-making, they started to cook up a collaboration that became Beating the Bounds: a conversation between neighborhoods. They thought about what it would look like to bring their separate practices together to investigate places. Drawing on the diverse fields and disciplines of performance art, sound and transmission art, writing, history, geography, mapping, community-engaged art, and memory studies, the two artists bring distinct perspectives and approaches to the project to provide the viewer with multiple points of access and identification.
One of the goals of Beating the Bounds is to encourage close looking and listening in the places we find ourselves. The other is to encourage public sharing of personal and collective memories and experiences as they relate to particular places, contributing to an already deep, vibrant, and layered geography.
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About the Artists
Mary Stuart Hall is a multi disciplinary artist living and working in Atlanta, GA. Her work considers the intersection of landscape, architecture and the production of space. Graduating with a degree in Studio Art at Sewanee, The University of the South, Mary Stuart Hall then completed a Masters in Art Education from the University of Georgia, and an MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).She has exhibited work throughout the US and internationally including an award for Best in Show at MINT Gallery’s annual juried exhibition. In 2016 she was an artist in residence at the ADAM Lab at Georgia Tech in collaboration with Eyedrum Gallery. In the summer of 2019 she was the MFAST Artist in Residence at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany where she exhibited at Gallery Flut. Mary Stuart was one of two MICA nominees for the Dedalus Foundation Award for Painting and Sculpture. She recently completed a residency at Volatile Parts with an installation and book titled, Hear and There. In the Fall of 2021 she took her project Taking Place to Richmond, VA for 1708’s Gallery’s public art event, InLight. Mary Stuart’s installation, As the Crow Flies, is on view at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Ga until 2023. Mary Stuart’s practice is driven by a desire to give form to the immaterial so that we can experience encounters that are immeasurable.
Meredith Kooi is an experimental artist, scholar, arts administrator, and educator whose site-responsive work uses video, performance, photography, sound, and writing to unveil the complexity of place and history. Driven by experience, Meredith’s process-based work actively integrates a myriad of knowledge- and sense-making practices to provide a holistic narrative of being. She has held artist residencies across the United States including Elsewhere, Wave Farm, PlySpace, and Hambidge, among others. Her public performance and installation work has been presented in Atlanta by Flux Projects, Hambidge and the Goat Farm, the Historic Oakland Cemetery, Eyedrum and art|DBF, and Little Five Arts Alive, among other organizations. As an educator, Meredith has taught a diversity of students including undergraduates, youths, and incarcerated adults in the classroom and as a workshop facilitator. She received her PhD in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts from Emory University, her MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Environmental Studies from Denison University.
Beating the Bounds: a conversation between neighborhoods is funded by the Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs