INDIE ROKKERS

Curated by ISAAC MEHKI

Exhibition Dates: APRIL 25 - JUNE 6, 2026
OPENING: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 2026 6-8PM
Artist talk: TBA

ATLANTA, GA – Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to announce Indie Rokkers, a group exhibition curated by Isaac Mehki.

lndie Rokkers brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose practices engage the conceptual and material dimensions of play. Spanning painting, sculpture, and expanded media, the exhibition considers play not as an escape from "ordinary" life, but as one of its most vital and generative conditions. Across the works on view, play emerges as a site of tension between structure and improvisation, rule and freedom, sincerity and absurdity.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure the paradox that defines play: it is at once freely chosen and bound by self-imposed constraints. This oscillation between limited and limitless possibility animates the practices of the artists included. Whether through systems of repetition, acts of mimicry, or gestures of humor and critique, each artist navigates the unstable boundary between discipline and spontaneity.

Drawing on Johan Huizinga's notion of the "magic circle", a space set apart from everyday life, lndie Rokkers proposes instead that play is inseparable from lived experience. From the satirical performances of Greek theater to the circulatory logic of contemporary image culture, play has long functioned as a mechanism for interrogating power and reconfiguring social relations. In this sense, play operates not only as a mode of diversion, but as a critical tool.

The exhibition also reflects on contemporary conditions of time and attention. If modernity has afforded increased leisure, it has equally produced new forms of anxiety and self-consciousness. In response, the artists in lndie Rokkers turn toward play as both a retreat and a method, a way of building provisional worlds that mirror, distort, and challenge the one we inhabit.

Echoing principles found in pedagogical models such as Anji Play, where self-directed exploration is foregrounded through love, risk, joy, engagement, and reflection, the works in this exhibition privilege process over outcome, and inquiry over resolution. Play, in this context, becomes a means of understanding: a rehearsal for social life, and a speculative space for its transformation. Featuring work by Harrison Wayne, Jill Frank, Deborah Zlotsky, Craig Drennen, Ezekiel Robinson, Kevin Hopkins, Sergio Suarez, Renee Stout, Mono Feo, Shawn Campbell, John Oetgen, Ross Landenberger, and David Ivie, lndie Rokkers assembles a dynamic set of practices that embrace the productive contradictions of play. In moments of ruin or revolt, these artists suggest, there remains the persistent possibility of play, and with it, new ways of seeing and being.