The Art of SigniaFirst Floor

The Southern identity and landscape are driving forces behind Carolyn Carr’s work. In whichever artistic pursuit, whether painting, shooting digitals, or clay sculptures, Carr’s process is deliberate, finding the meditative components of her work both deeply personal and intertwined with her culture.

An Atlanta native, Carr received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Atlanta College of Art and went on to exhibit internationally in the United States, Asia, and Central Europe. Her museum debuts are many; she has shown at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Her diptych work titled Unchartered Path is a large mixed media painting on linen canvas and will be on the first floor of Signia by Hilton Atlanta. The piece features bold lines of color that direct the eye across the canvas. Her colors are often natural pigments she observes, which furthers the connection of her work to the earth.

Widely exhibited visual artist, designer, and Professor Tristan Al-Haddad is a master of creating experiences for the viewer. His site-specific public works imprint on the landscape, pushing the boundaries of scale, manufacturing, and engineering.

Al-Haddad’s sculpture titled Bifurcations hangs at the entrance to the hotel, greeting guests entering the lobby. Its scale, visibility, and form provide a dynamic experience and fit the lobby’s double-height space. Al-Haddad has a Master of Architecture degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, evidence of which is shown throughout the breadth of his work.

Al-Haddad has exhibited at the Pompidou Center, the High Museum of Art, the Boston Center for the Arts, and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. A Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Al-Haddad has won several awards, including the Artadia Artist Award in 2009, and was selected to represent the USA at the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka.

Ashley Woodson Bailey is an artist who specializes in floral photography. Self-taught, Bailey uses bold colors, which she heavily contrasts in her centrally placed arrangements. She has been widely published and included in magazines like House Beautiful and has been featured in several celebrity homes, including those of Jessica Alba and Erin Foster. Bailey received a bachelor’s in art history and art from the University of Texas in Austin and has lived and worked across the United States.

For Signia by Hilton Atlanta, she is submitting several prints of floral photography. The titles of these pieces are Midnight in the Garden I, Midnight in the Garden II, Calm Before the Storm I, Calm Before the Storm II, Pure Love, Couture, Layers, and Way We Were. She is also selecting two works from her Revolution Empress series. She employs a chiaroscuro technique with her vivid cloud of smoke, which draws the focus toward the flowers. These pieces will be featured in several areas within the hotel on the first and second floors.

Atlanta-born artist Tyrus Lytton utilizes bright colors and abstraction to represent the nostalgic aims of his work. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Savannah College of Art and Design. His geometric patterns take precedent in his work, and he channels them through a collage-like format.

Lytton draws inspiration from historical events and design precedents from around the world. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA, and has founded his own design firm called XXO Studio, which works directly with luxury brands and hotels. His piece for Signia by Hilton Atlanta is a mural that will fill the space behind the central reception desk titled Floral Cross Stitch.

Bradley Sabin cultivates his sculptures as one would a garden, through painstaking care and attention. Sabin’s observations of the natural world are a driving force behind his work. His installations of flowers and organic forms interact with the environment through purposeful forms that evoke a reaction from viewers.

Sabin’s mural for Signia by Hilton Atlanta includes a large configuration of ceramic magnolias placed on the wall in a tree-like formation. All handcrafted, the installation evokes a sense of artisanship and represents ties to southeastern flora. The dynamic piece, titled Magnolias, hangs outside the social ballroom, greeting guests entering the space.

Sabin received his Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Louisiana State University and has taken on installations across the United States, branching out as wide as his intricate creations.

Leon Niehues is a self-taught artist living and working in the Arkansas Ozarks. Sourced from his own 40-acre woods, Niehues gathers both material and inspiration. His baskets are explorations into how materials can achieve human-like forms and qualities. They are inventive creations, made by bending the wood to achieve a desired form.

His pieces for Signia by Hilton Atlanta are from his Bentwood Basket and Overlay Vessel series, respectively, and will be featured outside the social ballroom on the first floor. The neutral colors he employs harken back to the environment, and his forms take on a subverted form of pre-existing and prehistoric shapes.

Niehues has been awarded several notable honors, which include the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship, USA Wingate Fellow, and has been shown in several notable collections across the United States.

Constantly seeking exploration through material, Todd Hoyer’s sculptures touch on the juxtapositions between objects found within the natural world. His artistic motivations stem from his inner journey, drawing upon the imperfections he finds in his materials. He graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Manufacturing Engineering and Design Technology, the evidence of which is featured in his work.

The materials he uses are intentional, as they offer visual and narrative contrasts. Hoyer manipulates his mediums in order to produce work that is rooted in nature but appears highly mechanized. His pieces teeter on the geometric, with wooden elements sculpted in severe ways like clay. The metalwork he employs is spliced into the vases in sparse ways.

Todd Hoyer is a celebrated artist with a host of exhibitions and collections under his belt. He has been featured in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

His pieces for Signia by Hilton Atlanta are sourced from his Suspended Sphere and Ringed series, respectively, and will be featured outside the social ballrooms for guests to witness as they enter the space.

Ceramic artist Virginia Scotchie often initiates contact between man-made and natural objects in her ceramic pieces. New forms are derived from fragmentation and dissection, and she finds inventive ways to fuse personal objects integral to her upbringing.

Scotchie is debuting two ceramic pieces for Signia by Hilton Atlanta, which will be featured outside the social ballroom on the first floor. One is titled Large Sphere No.1, and the other is titled Large Green Object. Each piece slightly subverts the concept of the vase through the addition of unique textures and the puncturing of the surface. The muted tones of the ceramics nod to the natural world, and touch on how time can mold and breakdown forms.

Scotchie received a Master of Fine Arts from Alfred University in New York and has been shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Gertrude Herbert Art Institute in Augusta, GA, the C.R.E.T.A. Ceramic Center in Rome, Italy, and the Vallauris Institute of Art in France.

Constantly deconstructing her visual vocabulary, Rocío Rodríguez’s work is expressive, gestural, and abstract. Her combination pieces are rich in texture, and she strikes a balance between movement and stillness.

In the span of her 40-year career, Rodríguez has exhibited widely and boasts collections in the High Museum of Art and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia. Her success resides in her ability to mirror unpredictability in both her life and work and approach the canvas as an exploratory tool rather than a medium for her work. Rodríguez received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia and has been working in the state ever since.

Rodríguez’s piece, titled Monument, is a tripartite oil on canvas that explores her preoccupations with form and space. She compartmentalizes lines to provide a juxtaposition between chaos and order. Each section of the painting is unstructured, with lines and colors flowing freely within its vertical column. This large piece will be featured outside the social ballroom of the hotel.

The intuitive process of painting is evident in Jennifer Jones’ work. Her layered mixed media works are heavily gestural and represent her contemplations of the natural world. Subjects within Jones’ brightly colored works are often not apparent at first but reveal themselves with time.

Jones is a highly impactful artist who has been widely exhibited and featured. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has had write-ups and exhibitions across Atlanta, GA, and abroad. These exhibitions include those at the Alan Avery Gallery in Atlanta, GA; the Foley Gallery in New York, NY; and the Besharat Gallery in Paris, France.

Jones’ piece for Signia by Hilton Atlanta is a mixed media piece titled Angel Oak meant to recall natural imagery found across the Southeastern United States. Her expressive brushstrokes create tension in the pieces, with moments of clarity sprinkled throughout. Her painting will be featured in the hospitality lounge of the hotel.

Richard Solomon is an Atlanta photographer with a Bachelor of Arts in photography and painting from the Massachusetts College of Art.

His pieces for Signia by Hilton Atlanta are titled Bouquet I, Bouquet II, Bouquet III, Cymbidium Hybrid, and Hippeastrum, respectively, and will be featured within the meeting room spaces of the hotel.

Each of his photographs is printed on paper and then further manipulated. They are figural, showing images of bouquets or singular flowers that take up the space of the full composition. The bright colors he employs are placed on a white background, which emphasizes the forms within the composition. His watercolor-like style is dreamy—shadows melt into the background and create an abstracted visual experience.

Ashley Woodson Bailey is an artist who specializes in floral photography. Self-taught, Bailey uses bold colors, which she heavily contrasts in her centrally placed arrangements. She has been widely published and included in magazines like House Beautiful and has been featured in several celebrity homes, including those of Jessica Alba and Erin Foster. Bailey received a bachelor’s in art history and art from the University of Texas in Austin and has lived and worked across the United States.
For the Signia Hotel, she is submitting several prints of floral photography. The titles of these pieces are Midnight in the Garden I, Midnight in the Garden II, Calm Before the Storm I, Calm Before the Storm II, Pure Love, Couture, Layers, and Way We Were. She is also selecting two works from her Revolution Empress series. She employs a chiaroscuro technique with her vivid cloud of smoke, which draws the focus toward the flowers. These pieces will be featured in several areas within the hotel on the first and second floors.

Sheri Schumacher is a textile designer-maker, based in Auburn, Alabama. Her creative practice focuses on exploring narratives about cultural landscapes and recording a sense of place through observation and material investigation. Discovery through the act of making is integral to her work, finding the hidden beauty of cloth from repurposed garments and linens with a history of use. She works with a range of processes, including hand stitching and fabric manipulation, creating textile assemblages from an intimate scale to larger site specific works.

Schumacher received a MFA in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, is a professor emerita of design at Auburn University School of Architecture, and exhibits her work nationally and internationally.