Dan Tague’s series of photographs Camelot after the Deluge consists of twelve photographs of the artist as model. He has replaced his head with a cardboard cutout of various pop culture figures. These figures include:

• Napoeloen Bonepart
• Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) from The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
• Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) from Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
• Dracula (Bela Lugosi) from Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
• George W. Bush
• Conan the Barbarian (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from Conan The Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)
• Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) from First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) hunting Bambi
• The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) from High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
• The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr) from The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)
• Jacques-Yves Cousteau
• Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) from the Pink Panther film series (Blake Edwards)
• The Gillman from The Creature from the Black Lagoon
• Mr. Roarke (Richardo Montalban) and Tattoo (Hervé Villechaize) from Fantasy Island

Three historical figures are represented within the works (Napoleon, Bush, Cousteau). Twelve are fictional characters (appropriated). Four are classic Hollywood movie monsters. Every personality in this work has been depicted either in movies or on television. Tague assumes these models and does his best to perform them. For the Dracula piece, Tague puts on a cape and holds a glass containing ‘blood.’ He transmogrifies himself from artist to subject to pop-culture identity. Tague attempts to act out each model, sometimes faithfully, sometimes ironically and sometimes both since the subjects themselves are sometimes in the ironic mode. His picture of George W. Bush features Tague reclining and enjoying a meal from McDonald’s: this piece may or may not be an exception, exchanging irony for satire, depending upon how the president sees himself. The viewer identifies with certain archetypes into which Tague inserts himself. He can easily transform from hero to monster (with Napoleon and Bush, of course, the identities of hero and monster is already murky).

Tague successfully combines pop culture with photography. In the work entitled The Artist in the Studio (part of the series not on display at the St. Claude Collective but viewable online at < http://www.dantague.com/artiststudio.html >) we are given insight into how the cardboard creations are made. Tague has hand drawn each cardboard face. It is a fascinating combination of mediums which create a delightfully playful effect. Tague enjoys juxtaposing his drawings onto himself. It acts as performance of possible identities for him.

The title of the series, Camelot after the Deluge reveals Tague’s own identity within his artwork being shattered after Katrina. These works were completed while Tague was in resident at La Napoule Art Foundation in France in 2006. As both a resident of New Orleans, and a visiting Artist, Tague had a New Orleanian identity to which people reacted. Another series of Tague’s photographs – Rock’n Royal- features the artist as (drunk, bedraggled, downtrodden) Clown around New Orleans trying to get back to normal and wondering like many New Orleanians just what that might turn out to be. This series posits a dark but playful shift in identity, an identity as fractured as the shattered city it found itself moving through. In Tague’s own words:

My work deals with re-conceptualizing objects in order to create a more specific narrative, whereby altering the objects identity. In the past couple of years my focus has shifted inward, and I have become the object under scrutiny. By developing various characters I intend to explore the public and private dimensions of identity. The clown, the hero, the celebrity, the villain, etc assumes the social and personal ramifications of gender and environment. This exploration of identity becomes a search for my own complex altered narratives.

Sergio Lobo-Navia

The eight years of the Bush Administration has seen the growth of two wildly different phenomena. The first is the erosion of civil liberties, noteably including increased surveillance and torture, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror.’ The second is the rise of broadband internet access, cheap cameras, and YouTube.

McClay brings together these two divergent ideas into one chilling interactive installation. Living in the world where a sneezing panda can be a part of Warhol’s dream that ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,’ McClay exhibits his own audience as subject and they in return act as voyeur.

Inside the Universal Furniture space, McClay’s installation occupies one of the former window displays. Steeping into the display we struggle to accommodate the one, rotating, light. We see a cage and inside it, a projector, web-cam, and the still rotating light. The projector displays the image which the web-cam is capturing -the people looking inside the cage. The projected images make it seem as though the people looking into the cage are in the cage.

Outside of the space, McClay has installed a flat-screen tv which also shows this web-cam image. Pedestrians on the street become part of the installation as they choose to either watch passively or completely ignore. In a world where cheap cameras create easy surveillance, those inside become part of the ’show’ without their consent. The passivity in the viewer both ‘inside’ the cage, inside the exhibition and outside on the street in effect documents as it demonstrates how Americans have sleepwalked their way into our current civil liberty nightmare.

The space given to McClay has been both beneficial and detrimental. When first given the space, McClay discovered that he could not raise the steel shutter on the window. This limitation fueled McClay to reconsider what he wanted to do. McClay’s work frequently addresses human rights issues and particularly torture in the light of recent political events, both domestic and international. In this case rather than representing torture and its aftermath he has revealed our responsibilities in the face political apathy.

Sergio Lobo-Navia.

Badlands is the only video art on display at the St. Claude Collective. Artist Greathouse describes his animated work on his website (http://www.michaelgreathouse.com) as:

“Inspired by film noir and [sic] b/w Hollywood horror films, my most recent work is a series of short video loops produced exclusively with composited computer animation. In these videos there is no beginning and no end, only a single moment continually repeating like a skipping record. Questions are not answered; the story is implied but never defined.”
We hear footsteps, the buzz of power transistors, buzzards, and white noise which together overtake the viewer as the camera slowly pans around. The sun bears down and buzzards fly ominously ahead. Soon a lens flair begins to distort the image. We begin again where we started. The sound overtakes us, as we are doomed to go around the same pole over and over. Time is lost. We are lost. Somehow amidst this lush representation the world has been cropped to a point that we cannot locate ourselves, cannot find a way to orient our presence in relation to an overwhelming moment in the world.

Badlands are an arid landscape with clay rich soils and heavy erosion due to wind and water. By their nature (and name) they are bad lands. Lands you never want to cross. Badlands conveys a mental state which no person wants to traverse. Circling around, stuck on an un-navigable course , unable to move. This is a horror film in which we are our own monster, in which we hear our footsteps ricocheting toward our own demise.

Sergio Lobo-Navia

“Looking at a map can give you all sorts of feelings.” Douglas Brewster’s Welcome to the Gulf is a fascinating narrative of the artist’s own personal history, meteorological disturbances, and a sociological map of the Southern United States. Composed and adjusted over the span of four years (2004-2008) this work addresses the Gulf Dead Zone, Hurricanes Ivan, Katrina, and Rita, and the artist’s own personal histories. As time went by, the painting has grown in size until it reached the proportions we see today.

Brewster began the painting before Hurricane Ivan in 2004. He originally wanted to explore, though his work, the Gulf Dead Zone. Off the coast of Louisiana, there exists an area about the size of New Jersey where no plant or animal can survive. This dead zone has been created by a combination of runoff from Midwestern agro-business and off shore oil platforms. In the middle of creating the work, Hurricane Ivan threatened Louisiana and Brewster evacuated from his Covington home. His journal took the direction that many would take over the years in response to Ivan, Katrina, Rita, and Gustav. The journey northward to find shelter (for Brewster, his arrow dotted journey to Memphis -DUCKS, RIBS, ELVIS- and Little Rock -home of Wal-Mart and Chicken farms) and the eventual return home. Text gives the artist’s commentary, ranging from motels with dirty sheets to why people still cling to the design of confederate flags -the flags, he reminds us, of losers.

After Ivan, Brewster decided to expand his painting. He literally cut out the area of the dead zone and focused on creating a larger map of the south. As a distant cousin of Robert E. Lee, Brewster is particularly concerned that many still need to move on from Guns, Jesus, and the Confederacy. Brewster fills the maps with all sorts of images and locations. The flags of each state, some of which show their Confederate origins, economic factors (including the intensive agriculture which causes the dead zone). Within the gulf itself, an oil freighter becomes a Brechtian Black Freighter with a toxic albatross hung around its neck.

Maps can show topographical information. Maps can show political information. Maps can show places where meaning and memory intersect. Brewster’s painting reveals all of these things. Collating his symbols, memories, geographies, and political comentaries, Brewster shows us what he sees when he looks at a map. This is an image which clearly identifies the roots of many of our problems. Brewster himself, however is cautiously optimistic about the future of the map and the world it represents. His own family legacy is proof that history can be re-worked, adjusted, re-presented in ways that learn from their own trajectories.

Sergio Lobo-Navia.

Ron Bechet’s contribution to the Saint Claude collective exhibition is typical of his recent practice. It is a figurative painting of the lower portion of a large tree, probably a great oak, and its roots. This natural scene appears drawn from the southern Louisiana landscape. It was painted with a quick, gestural hand; the impasto is heavily, the brush strokes clearly evident. His palette is of blues, greens, and yellows. He gives the scene greater significance by painting onto a three dimensional canvas of his own devising. The surface is rounded horizontally and has a trench-like indentation down the middle. The shaped canvas seems architectural and gives the painting a stronger presence, a stronger sense of how it occupies space. What is offered leaves us in no doubt that Bechet attributes a spiritual importance to the landscape and to trees in particular.

Sarah Brewer

Mary Jane Parker’s piece Camouflaged consists of 35 similar panels (encaustic on wood, each roughly one foot square). The color scheme is an attractive green and pink. Each panel is covered in a random, organic camouflage pattern somehow suggestive of leopard print. Key panels contain line drawings of parts of the body (feet, faces, hands) so that it appears as if two people are facing the viewer and are undressing. These figures are not immediately evident because of the camouflage and the missing parts of each body. The multiple pieces break up the picture plane and add the misleading logic of the grid to the camouflaged effect. Although the people are facing the audience, they have their eyes closed or covered by hands as if they sincerely wish not to be seen. Only their faces, feet and hands (which in each case are either working on unbuttoning) reveal their forms. Camouflaged’s focus on covering the eyes and body raises questions about the function of clothes as camouflage and our peculiar cultural need to see bodies as clothed or undressed but always in some way or another frankly disguised.

Sarah Brewer

Sarah Brewer.

Chicory Miles offers two cast-bronze pieces in this show. Her Churning of the Milk hangs from the ceiling. It appears to be a pod-like vessel, though the opening is too high to be in sight. The pod is composed of bulbous organic forms which resemble hanging breasts, as the title would indicate. They are abstracted such that some have a narrower, cucumber shape so that they may be read as vegetable despite the indication of nipples on their tips. The female body is often associated with the organic, and specifically in art history with fruit or flowers. The seed-pod offered here is an interestingly indirect metaphor, suggesting the protective quality of the womb as well as its more usually represented fecundity. Despite the formal resolution of the piece as sculpture its subject being an arrangement of breasts is a somewhat grotesque play on the typical comparisons. Chicory was heavily pregnant during Katrina and felt that her own fertility carried extraordinary responsibility. Although not shown in this exhibition, she made a fascinating film, also called The Churning of the Milk shortly after the storm which displaces the more direct concerns about rebuilding to a metaphorical and poetic commentary on the responsibility of bringing life into the world. In this case then, we may suggest that she is her own subject and that her condition as artist-mother is something she is addressing in relation to a far wider understanding of the role of creativity.

Earose is a sculptural form consisting of several circular clusters of human-shaped ears. In each circle the ears radiate and overlap from the middle, like petals of a flower. Some of the circles overlap at points; causing the piece to resemble both flowers and bacterial cultures. This piece also creates revulsion and humor by repeating a part of the human body. Her insistence on listing forges a fascinating counterpart to her representation of fertility, protection and nurturing. In order to create, she seems to imply, we must hear the voices of the works we beget. In taking organic elements out of context and repeating them in ways suggestive of other organic forms, this work walks the line between figuration and conceptual practice with unusual certainty. She offers us an unusually deft rendering informed by biography but not dependant upon it for legibility.

Sarah Brewer.

Robin Levy shows us an image of a long horizontal white & red banded strand: LIFELINE #3 (umbilical cord), which is a C print edition (1 of 3). Almost completely abstract at first glance, two thick red bands are stretched over a strand, winding around it like stripes on a candy cane, disappearing left and right. The strand between these bands is very light pink, so faint that it is difficult to differentiate from the white ground engulfing it, fully revealed only by imagination conspiring with the absence implied by the two red bands. The flatness of the image and the texture of the red where present makes this similar to a microscope slide at first undetermined but very beautiful. The half inch thick piece of glass laid over the image seems to preserve it in an attempt to make it more observable. A precious thing, to be revered, elegant in its simple seeming complexity. Powerful in its purpose. Levy’s treatment of composition and the fomal qualities of the almost abstracted image unfolds a mystery, the umbilical cord which lends its purpose to the work in its title: LIFELINE.

Levy succeeds in dedicating the same purposeful simplicity in this photograph that she has brought to all her recent work. Although the sculptor’s concern with the object and its fabrication are less pronounced here than in her more conventionally three dimensional practice, her restraint here is no less carefully considered, her deployment of materials retaining their purposefulness in the displaying of this astonishing photograph.

Matthew Baughman

At first glance these drawings appear to be randomly, if obsessively, scribbled. Similar to a quick figure drawing, a Cy Twombly rethought as a directional map, or a drawing done with a magical Scribble Pen toy for children. Upon further investigation it reveals itself as a drawing but not, as at first anticipated, of a figure. It is a map but not made by Twombly and these scribbles weren’t made by a toy pen for kids. These map scribbles were made with ink by Michelle Dussault, they are continuous drawings that represent her interpretation of a map drawn in the process of riding the street car, go figure. This map-making in the present of travel explains the quality of the line. She has guided her audience to this conclusion by indicating the names of well known places in New Orleans written at points (like stops) along the line.

Michelle Dussault’s series of drawings are made with ink on long scroll sheets of very thin paper. They are carefully displayed around other artists’ work in close proximity to one of the entranceways of the exhibition space. This placement introduces an interesting fusion with the difficult space. Canal Street Line: Cypress Grove, St. Charles Ave Line, No. 914: Happy Dogs, and Canal Street Line No. 934:Joy are displayed length wise and separated vertically on the left side of the door. The titles represent the particular street car line, followed by a personal subtitle . St. Charles Avenue Line was not given a subtitle and is separated from the other three, displayed on the right side of the same door. Above the door is RTA a wall collage of cut out individual map drawings.

Michelle has chosen to place her drawings directly on to the drywall in the same fashion that a map or blueprint might be displayed. This treatment of the presentation fits Michelle’s idea of a map and prevents the distraction of a frame or of glass covering the drawing, evading in the process any notion that these maps have been archived or purposely drawn to be displayed as art in the conventional manner. Instead she makes her intentions very clear, revealing the work as a quick sketch, designed in its turn to reveal its movement and recall at once the moment and the making of its mark. In this way Michelle succeeds in letting us know that she is more concerned with making than reflecting. This helps us to see the piece in terms of the act of her journey around New Orleans, an act we may already have followed, a shared memory or an invitation depending on our own respective histories

Matthew Baughman

This triptych is of an impressive scale, measuring six feet tall and eight feet wide. The three seascape panels are separated horizontally and are titled Chrome and Blue Skies #1, #2, and #3 starting from the top. The images are painted in oil on manipulated digital print. Each image represents the beautiful effect of chrome reflections that distort a bright blue sky above a classic red automobile.

When viewed from a distance these images display incredible movement; they suggest frames reflecting off the car in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas”, representing Dr. Thompsons drug induced viewpoint of his red Chevrolet Impala convertible, itself known as “The Great Red Shark”, they are at once disturbing and quite beautiful. These exaggerated images of “The Great Red Shark” carry the name “Blue Skies”, which reminds viewers of the incredible shimmering blue skies, domnant in the reflections in the piece, significant in relation to Lockwood’s many other paintings of automobiles because they all have titles that relate more directly to the reflected rather than the reflector. This is easily seen in the way she chooses to focus on the beauty of the reflections that a different part of each auto returns to us. She shows this with her use of oil paint to highlight and intensify the stretching and warping effect the chrome has on the light it throws. The large scale of the piece, together with the cropping which implies intense closeness, allows its viewers to notice details above all else, hiding nothing yet unwilling to reveal itself to the impatient eye.

For those with time to look carefully, after admiring the reflection of blue skies and other automobiles, the photographer reveals herself on the left side of the piece. This provides another subject to put in question after the blue skies and automobiles become self explanatory. This subtly reveals the true nature of the piece by honoring the original work as a photograph and encourages the audience to think deeper than the skein of the machine made surface or even the landscape it reflects. This work might be classified by the traditional yet almost unrehearsed category of the populated landscape”, a category formerly considered above still-life, above landscape and even above landscape with architecture. One very small step below history painting and deserving of the scale deployed in this very contemporary example.

Matthew Baughman

At the end of the first hallway on the right on either side of an arched doorway rest two cold cast steel skulls: Cornu Sapiens & Monu Sapiens. They sit on top of black fabric, bordered in lace which hangs over a black pedestal, about three and a half feet from the ground. This display makes these skulls appear important, seeming to replicate a museums installation. The dark bronze color of the skulls blends with the black fabric and pedestal they rest upon, encouraging viewers to look more closely and appreciate the rippled texture on the slight sheen of the steel. These subtleties reveal the nature of the steel itself and keep the works honest to their medium .

The subject matter is just as “heavy” as the material these pieces were made from. Goldfinch shows this by placing the labels on the fabric directly in front of each skull. This is consistent with the direct titles that serve to classify these artifact-like fictions. Cornu Sapiens is displayed on the left and naturally the first to be noticed. It has predominantly human characteristics, together with a horn, longer than the skull itself, protruding from the middle of its upper forehead at a 45 degree angle. Monu Sapiens, on the right, is slightly smaller and has an obliquely angled cone beveled in the middle of its forehead in the same fashion as the eye sockets in Cornu Sapiens. This large socket leaves it up to the imagination of the viewer to formulate what a pool-ball sized eye would look like in the middle of a human forehead. Her fictional reality comes to life in our imaginations as we read the titles again and realize that this is only one instance of each Genus. Where, we wonder, are their friends, their offspring, their living relatives?

Matthew Baughman

Alex Podesta presents The Hero. Two boys ride a stuffed rabbit: SUPERSIZED. The giant stuffed animal has the scale of a baby elephant with white fur so soft it could be manufactured by Ty Inc. The rabbit’s extra-long ears are reminiscent of the Disney character Dumbo and hang to its feet, although the overall aesthetic more closely approximates something found in Japanese anime. A muzzle made out of a long thin red piece of string placed carefully over its mouth is being held by one of two manikin boys that are on top of the rabbit. The boys are identical and dressed alike. They wear typical boys clothing: Liberty overalls, long sleeved turtle necks, white tennis shoes. They have the mandatory burgundy adventuring towels of boyhood tied around their necks, acting as capes, identifying the lads as knights and heros. The boy in front takes charge of the string lead that harnesses the rabbit and the boy in back firmly holds his sword aloft.

All the properties of this sculpture are very playful and emphasize its “toy-like” quality, despite the scale. The idea for this sculpture looks like it came straight out of a story book, its physical presence seems ideal for an upscale toy store at the mall. This book, however, should not be judged by its cover and this idea didn’t start with this form. The playful use of rabbits and manikins is a theme in Podesta’s earlier work, which gives clues that allow us to contextualize this particularly impressive example. The titles of his work are all very true to the subject matter in the piece. For example, Self-Portrait as Bunnies (Hubris) is mixed media sculpture of two manikins dressed in fury bunny suits with only their faces, bare feet, and hands exposed. They lay stomach down , their feet in the sky, cooperatively playing with a stuffed white rabbit. Works like this and others are exactly what they say they are. In this one he honestly puts the word “hubris” in parenthesis letting us know he understands the dangers implicit in looking like a manikin in a bunny suit playing with a real fake bunny. He admits even more in The Hero because he is showing us his hero. The hero of boyhood, of untainted fantasy, of the flawed but glorious knights who charged forward to adventure in their peculiar, bunnified, imaginary world. The rabbit is the inspiration behind most of his other recent works which all include manikins dressed as rabbits. In effect The Hero is Podesta’s dedication piece to his favorite subject. The manikin twins back him up by showing us that this bunny is taking them on an adventure; this is their hero, the artist’s hero and why not our too? Podesta remains consistent in this and emphasizes his theme still further by putting two of the boys in the piece. It wouldn’t be an Alex Podesta if he didn’t: he obsessively puts a second iteration of the primary subject in many recent works, most usually a manikin dressed in a bunny suit, in case postmodernism were to overcome his dreams.

Both together and apart from his other work this sculpture has the feeling of a new approach to a universal theme. In the light of his wider practice, it is a new approach to a clearly established theme, an iteration of an iteration. Even more intriguing though is its success as a play within a play, isolated from Podestas world of rabbits, in the theatre of a gallery space, surrounded by and in conversation with a broad range of other works.

Matthew Baughman

Dave Hood.

John Greco’s beautifully crafted group of copper assemblages brings a much-welcomed appreciation for well-made objects to the St. Claude Collective show. Greco has nine such objects on display, several of which are urns bearing distinctly New Orleans street names. The acid-etched surfaces do not betray the time that the artist has poured into them, revealing tacitly however an unrivaled level of craftsmanship brought to the work. His subject matter ranges in topic from the scientific and anatomical to the personal, such as in Requiem for a City – Pt 1. The copper used to create the urn was salvaged from the artist’s flooded studio, and the unmistakable patina of flooded metal beautifully decorates the object’s surface. His observation of the transient nature of all things applies equally to his anatomical work in which he depicts a stylized cross-section of an organ to remind the viewer of the decay occurring constantly within each of us. Greco’s work is simultaneously a reminder of the ephemeral nature of all things and a snapshot our desire for its persistence. The copper from which this series is so exquisitely fabricated emphasizes this temporal quality; copper may last longer than living flesh but when exposed to the elements the same processes which transmogrify its surfaces to that gorgeous copper oxide teal will eventually wash the whole away

Dave Hood.

Frahn Koerner’s contribution to the St. Claude Collective is one which is rooted in her methodical approach to her work which brings her paintings a finish that has been thoroughly contemplated and explored. The subtle textures of these paintings provide an extra layer of depth which the artist notes is one of her favorite ways to work: “the hidden layers hopefully suggest an element of mystery.” In addition to the application of texture in her paintings, her selective choice of imagery is almost equally as important. Boats play a large role, as they played a large role in her life growing up on the Gulf coast.

Dave Hood.

Christopher Saucedo’s current installation at the St. Claude Collective is an intensely personal investigation into identity and how it relates to space, or in this case and appropriately enough for a sculptor, volume. Saucedo offers us a traditional family portrait photograph and, placed on the floor in front of the photograph, a group of four cylindrical steel penny-weight forms. Each form is named after the family member it represents “in exact weight and volume only”. This work brings to light the issue of the viewers’ relationship to the piece in terms of space, mass, and volume as well as the space around the work contained by the gallery.

He has created his family portrait in a similar manner to earlier work, such as Us, Them & Other (2004), in which Saucedo recreated a still earlier generation of sculptures into unassembled, 1/4 scale replicas. There is an ongoing back-and-fourth in this artist’s career in which the works themselves become part of his family, making it appropriate that his family has finally itself become part of the work.

One further element was added to this family portrait after Katrina. This form is transparent and stuffed full of white rubber figures, Africans in 19th century colonial dress. As an Italian/Native American Brooklynite transplanted to New Orleans long before the storm, Saucedo has long been alive to the racial tensions and economic complexities which remain too tied to them in this city. This final complex form represents the ghosts of the storm, the politics which made them, the guilt which those who were able to survive the devastation of material things and the disruption of family life carry with them. He includes this element as part of his family portrait, unable to dissociate what it represents from his own history, a history which will always be carried with his family in its much altered, post-storm, present.

As part of this installation, Saucedo has included illustrated directions showing how to measure one’s own weight and volume. This lends the work a playful tone, inviting the viewer to create a similar self-portrait for themselves. The directions for casting in bronze seem to be missing…

Dave Hood.

Nick Sherman

Scott Guion’s two works, Through the Looking Glass and The Lawn Jockey’s Revenge, 2008, are photo-realistically painted representations of New Orleans scenes with very loaded imagery and subject matter. Through the Looking Glass is set at Club Fabulous, a bar on Claiborne Avenue. In this piece we see a young white child riding a black panther, which is part of the decoration of the club. Security cameras, a Junction East sign, Dixie beer, a queen of hearts, a mushroom, and a caterpillar barely scratch the surface of visual references deployed in this piece. He tells a story of New Orleans life and culture from a unique and significantly detailed viewpoint. The Lawn Jockey’s Revenge takes place in front of Ms. Mae’s, a bar on Magazine Street. A drunken white couple, one of New Orleans well known caricatured figures, is fighting at the forefront. One has a broken beer bottle, the other a knife. An African American figure, in the manner of a lawn ornament from earlier in the century, is riding Jackson’s horse; both are red. Another African American figure dressed in a flowing red robe is seated on a gold sphere with a rainbow crossing his body. Additionally there is a white homeless man walking in front of the bar. Again, this imagery is only some of what is present in these very elaborate paintings. They are politically charged, expressive, and very beautifully crafted.

Mary Colleen Hickey.

Sallie Anne Glassman creates rich, vibrant oil paintings that draw the viewer in immediately. Extensive use of New Orleans imagery and an intensely emotional treatment give her pieces an undeniable character. Glassman draws upon line and bright splashes of color to give her works a sensual flow and direction. Two of her pieces, When the Sun Goes Down the Light Comes Up, 2008, and City Swamp, 2008, bring to light the closeness of the city of New Orleans to the surrounding water. Rosey Dawn, 2008, focuses in simply on the beauty of the swamp in Louisiana. Each of these works contains the life force of Louisiana and the series is a vignette into the natural landscape of the area.

Mary Colleen Hickey

Longitude/Latitude, 2008, is an imposing abstraction painted by Doyle Gertjejansen. It was created using two canvases and multiple layers of imagery. Overlying everything are large non-referential shapes in individual, vibrant colors some with brushed black detailing, others expressed as color gradients. Underneath these are expressive gestural lines, in varying muted colors. Theses lines move through the piece, balancing the weight of the colored shapes. The work itself is powerful and expressive, leaving the viewer considering direction and orientation and following the purposeful pattern in what at first appears a random series of marks. Gertjejansen uses multiple techniques to create a juxtaposition of rough line, technical line, rough shape and technical shape. This tension allows the viewer to find their own direction and obliges speculation about any eventual narrative.

Mary Colleen Hickey

Mary Colleen Hickey

David Buckingham’s work is arresting. The thick, bold typeface in coexistence with the harsh, eroded metal exoskeleton, accurately brings one of the most memorable lines in American cinema to life. Straight out of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Buckingham presents ENGLISH, MOTHER FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT? The sign has strikingly industrial characteristics, which seem to compliment the message, giving it an even more vulgar tone. With its eroded appearance, and rust-ridden surface, the work jumps at the viewer with threatening intentions. The bright colors and large scale make the piece extremely difficult to ignore as it contrasts profoundly with its surroundings. Although viewers are, in all likelihood, made uncomfortable at the sight of such a message, this seems to be an appropriate and intended reaction. Such a display is very much out of place in the polite society of the gallery, but it is that very characteristic that makes the piece pertinent in this very unconventional setting. An insult to one’s senses such as this allows people to understand the importance of crass behavior in a society that selectively ostracizes the development of new ideas. There is something that is extraordinarily pleasing about the work’s offensiveness. It is an insult to society, a sleight to present-day America and its pretended Puritanism. The movie from which it is derived is widely acclaimed not only for of its excellent plotline but also for the alacrity of its distasteful but very available content. In addition to the large sign we see a rather large cut-out of a gun, titled Huey P. Long. This second element of the diptych captures humanity’s dissatisfaction with society’s indulgence in corrupt political affairs and brings the piece home to New Orleans. Representing our historical figure, the piece presents an insight into the affairs of corrupt bureaucrats and the peculiar celebration of bad politics which only this city can turn into cause for a parade. It is crucial, at times, for people to be exposed to something they would not ordinarily indulge, and Buckingham’s work does exactly that.

The life of corporate America is indisputably boring for the average American. With the routine life, dull workspace, long hours - amongst other irritations - it is difficult to see why most people who find themselves trapped into such a lifestyle are not registered as clinically insane. Tim Best’s Axe #1 & Axe # 2 offers an amusingly accurate interpretation of what it must feel like for the individual who participates unwillingly in such a setting. The works depict two hostile photographs of the artist, dressed in an appropriately corporate suit, holding a bright yellow axe. Due to the rigid nature of corporate life, with its strict conformity and encouraged loss of identity for many of its perpetuators (should that read perpetrators?), the very idea of a man in such violent rebellion is an unlikely image. It seems to depict the frustration with one’s inability to voice opinions or thoughts in an environment that does not condone such behavior. Conformity has driven this man to the edge of psychosis. However, despite the menacing attitude seen in both images, there is an element of comedy involved. This same comedy is strangely reminiscent to both the novel and the movie American Psycho. In that story, a young successful Wall Street entrepreneur named Patrick Bateman loses his grip on reality. In one scene in particular, Bateman, dressed in a suit and raincoat, murders a coworker with an axe. The scenario is very much the same as what is being displayed in Best’s work. Both are tragic-comic takes on the monotonous lifestyle known in the corporate workforce. Even something as simple as the posture of the subject diverts the viewer’s attention away from the violent implications of the act represented. His facial expressions, although wrought with emotion, are distorted in a manner that one may find at once childish and entertaining. Much as with an infant, it is difficult to regard such a harmless and mild-mannered figure as a threat. There is a sort of humor that can be found in Tim’s work. While screaming a cautionary message, a cry for reform, it remains comical and light-hearted.

Nick Sherman

Tina Girouard’s work combines a mixture of New Orleans Mardi Gras themes with Voodoo images and Mexican Day of the Dead symbolism. Figures (hand sewn glass beads, sequins, acrylic and other media on canvas) is a colorful cornucopia of ideas. The piece includes dancing female figures, fetal babies, skulls, revelers, and a purple and blue saxophone. The work does not suggest a cohesive narrative but seems rather to be a blending of ideas and cultures - an idea widely accepted in New Orleans. The city was founded primarily on French and Spanish traditions but the area was settled by people of widely divergent cultures all of whom have all shared their traditions, some willingly, some by force, still others against their better judgment. The piece is extremely intricate: its undeniable New Orleans sensibility might best be compared to a kind of gumbo. Many different ingredients come together to make a delicious whole; a pictorial conflagration of cultural traditions, nicely spiced.

Victoria Micelli.

Myrtle von Damitz’s work brings to the table at once a sense of playfulness and of the macabre. Her offerings here seem simultaneously unalike and yet somewhat related. Her piece Sitting on the Levee, Watching the Ships, (ink and acrylic on Masonite) shows distorted figures reclining. She uses very vivid colors that make her work seem playful; yet the figures and subject matter evoke rather the uncanny. Her piece Watch out for Prudence, (ink and Acrylic on board) depicts a gazebo structure with distorted childlike figures, playing. Her colors are bright and open but still possess that sense of the disquieting uncanny. Her piece, Striken (ink and acrylic on board) is similar two the other two in the usage of color and misshapen figures but this time is a portrait. The work, like most good portraits, gives you the uncomfortable sense that the subject is watching you as you are observing them.

Myrtle’s work is darkly comic. She is able to make your skin prickle whilst she makes you smile. She makes the viewer feel these things by drawing them close with the appealing colors whilst provoking that strange feeling that they are the ones being at once observed and inducted into a fairy tale alternative to their own, familiar, world.

Victoria Micelli

Mike Fedor presents four pieces, all very different yet displaying noticeable similarities. Each uses bright colors to suggest themes which are at once oblique and macabre. Pumpkin shows a human-like creature with a pumpkin head riding a mermaid as though it were a horse (18×24 mix media on watercolor paper). The piece is reminiscent of the headless horseman tale, here relocated to the sometimes underwater city of New Orleans. Wormhole (a carbon print (negative 1979) and metal fumage on wood) shows New York fireman from 1979 standing in front of the then just completed and definitely still-standing World Trade Center. Under the photograph is a pipe suggestive of a wormhole which, so the artist seems to suggest, would allow someone to travel in time to intervene in a history which in this image remains in the future, a future which is now our past. Fedor’s piece Chick little, (oil on linen 24×20), shows a brightly colored yet curiously forlorn looking chick, manipulated to suggest a role as a farmer or rancher. This work suggests responsibility for having to do something as well as remorse for the deed done. As a vegetarian I am much struck by this, though for once less guilty than most in my own relationship with farming and livestock. His last work Crash Test, a collage pigment print, is also a brightly colored piece with political implications. In this work we see represented two crash-test dummies and in the background a horse with a burning American flag. This work seems clearly to suggest that that we, as Americans ride to our own destruction by testing our ideas on others without their consent.

Victoria Micelli.

Gary Oaks’ piece “Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche)” is an extremely tall, elongated sculpture made from cast aluminum, wood and lead. The work depicts a man with a small body and very long legs, constricted and bound. Gary Oaks’ works have a consistently philosophical engagement. Nietzsche’s work about Zarathustra investigates ideas of eternity, God, and human nature. The sculpture is an iconic representation of Nietzsche, reminiscent of Giacometti’s standing figures. Nietzsche’s philosophy of God is that he does not exist but is a product of man to gain power and to frighten people into obedience. Oaks’ piece may suggest that the philosopher has turned himself into a deity to be feared and worshipped. Alternatively the unavoidable formal reference to Giacomitti may lead us to understand this sculpture in the framework proposed by Sartre to describe those works whose apparent fragility for him represented both spacial isolation and the difficulty of willing oneself into existence – an idea which he felt Giacometti perfectly demonstrated with his fine, fragile figures on their tiny, cast pedestals. To represent a German philosopher in terms so closely defined by French post-war thinking is at once peculiar and revealing. Nietzsche’s politics did not match Sartre’s but the practical effect of their thinking might be said to reveal how extreme left and right get very close to one another when considered in their most abstract forms. Or perhaps Oaks simply arrived at a similar formal place for quite different reasons. In either case, this is a remarkable sculpture of a subject not widely embraced by visual practitioners.

Victoria Micelli.

Random Nature

Random Nature is a 4 by 4 grid of 16 acrylic paintings on canvas (24” x 24” x 1.5” each). These are arranged approximately an inch apart, making a slightly larger than 8 foot square, covering almost an entire wall. Colorful washes of organic shapes and tantalizing lines rest on an off-white ground. There are soft, pale greens, pinks, purples, and grays, alongside some darker, contrasting hues. An evolution of organic tracery intermingles. The third canvas in the second column has a centered, enclosed orange line that meanders into an organic shape. Thin strips of orange drip from this thicker solid form. A light-blue wash faintly emerges in this shape’s upper right side out of a lighter ground. Other thin lines lightly occupy the background. Many of the other canvases contain multiples of circular shapes that float on washed intermediary grounds. These repeated forms bind the work together.

Hall’s recent work, like “Random Nature,” explores the organic shapes produced within nature set against the artificiality of their representation. Soft subtle shapes in pale colors intermingle between their frames while mimicking the other images across the larger composition, the whole structured by nature’s antithesis – the grid – not depicted but standing as structurally present in the physical fragments of the work.

Tuyen Nguyen.

Kyle Bravo’s work stands as a reminder of the all-too-familiar guerilla signage that has proliferated along our city streets since Katrina rendered all New Orleans telephone directories irrelevant. Signs advertising services or materials to assist in our recovery are here printed in large numbers on square sheets of unfinished drywall. The black drywall screws that hold these sheets on the gallery wall are left visible to the viewer. The piece plays with impracticality, as it is a wall itself sitting on an existing though badly damaged wall. The five sheets are hung in the shape of an x. The printing process of each is unique. The upper right arm and lower left arm of this work are printed in a circular pattern, resulting in a resemblance to the blade of a circular saw. Just as on the street, the signs begin to conceal their own messages as they overlap one another. The repitition on the lower left reads “WE BUY HOUSES” and is followed by a phone number and - more illegible text, possibly a website. These signs still contain the pencil draft marks used to guide the circular printing. The upper left square is printed in a straight line from one end of the drywall square bleeding off at the other end. These were printed over and over with ever less ink remaining, creating a fade from black to grey, then black to grey again. The middle print and lower right one have a more playful wavering motion. It is almost as though they are chasing each other off their squares.

The piece comments on the nature of New Orleans’s recovery. The white drywall x is redolent of the bandages often found in cartoons, as though covering the wounds of the city. The materials, the signs, and the final form of this work are an accurate realization of the city’s current state of recovery. There are positive aspects and there are negative ones: some are rebuilding while some have to let go and are trying to sell what remains of their homes and live elsewhere. Guerilla signage remains ubiquitous, littering our roadsides. Drywall is still being installed, and homes are still uninhabited and waiting to be rebuilt, torn down or raised. Kyle Bravo revitalizes the use of common materials to express the open truth of a city in dire need of repair.

Tuyen Nguyen.

A doctor’s visit that seems not to have gone so well can be observed in Jenny LeBlanc’s installation. The work, though, may be less of an installation and rather the physical trace of a documented event or process that occurred previously. A typical doctor’s office, with its institutional blue walls topped with floral wallpaper, clock, steel trashcan, waiting chair, biology posters, coat rack, and exam table, are all enclosed by a transparent wall and presented with a black relief print and a video. The print shows the lungs upside down, birds are perched on branches of veins. Inside the office, a print remains on the torn end of the exam table paper while crumpled prints overflow from the biohazard-labeled trashcan. Little green feathers litter the floor. A pair of skin-colored spandex shorts bearing the relief cut used to print the image hangs on the coat rack. The video presented is a looped documentation of what occurred in the space. A woman goes to a doctor’s office. She waits and waits. Dressed in a hospital gown, when the doctor arrives, she stands up exposing her rear end, the relief. The image prints as she sits on the table. She follows the doctor’s instructions, including the final one: “Hold your breath.” Doing this, for as long as she can, she coughs up green feathers, when her body calls for air. The video narrates the making of the print while the print explains the occurrences within the video. Hold Your Breath is a cyclical narration of an experience of a place, a time, and its byproduct. Unless this is realism at its most magical, we should perhaps assume that the narrative is at the level of metaphor.

Jenny LeBlanc’s work combines the printmaking process and performance. She creates sculptural objects that can be used in a performance of printmaking, a repetitious act, allowing her to document her experiences with mark making. LeBlanc says, “…all action resulting from all beings leaves some kind of mark, trace, or residue in its wake. The residue in turn gives clues about what has taken place.” “Hold Your Breath” not only addresses this personal residue left by the artist as an individual but also the larger residue embodied by New Orleans post-Katrina. The green feathers are remnants of the same parrots found in her earlier work “M and Q.” Her interest in them intensified as the parrots that once flocked her neighborhood continue to fail to return. She wonders, “Do they know something we don’t? Do they know better than to come around because of the mold and contamination? Ultimately, the parrots emblemize for me a healthy and vibrant, intact New Orleans.” As healthcare becomes a less and less accessible luxury for most Americans in our ever-wealthy country, LeBlanc scrutinizes a wider healing process in New Orleans. She recognizes that healing has yet to reach completion and that this recovery is a very necessary process no matter the price, even if it means taking a few years off of her life, staying in New Orleans and contributing to it’s rebirth is important to her, and to her community.

Tuyen Nguyen.

These photographs provoke curiosity about their subjects. They seem to contain untold narratives that beg permission to be spoken. There are seven black and white inkjet prints (12”x18”) created from 35mm film, the first row of four photos is laid out vertically above the second row of three horizontally positioned images. The first photo Masker in Window shows in the background a masked man with his left elbow resting on a sill, peering out of a dark window. The building is at a slight diagonal from the lower left to a quarter upward on the right. In front of this dilapidated wall with patches of missing paint a feather-costumed woman is seated at a table. At the edge of the photograph we can see that she is engaged with a two other women, cropped, one represented by an arm and the other by a handbag. The composition draws the eye around the image in search of untraceable clues to the identity of the masked man.

The photographs fit together, representing New Orleans, though not the typically represented touristy side of town. A few are taken in more familiar areas but these locations are never the subjects of the work. Couvillion’s figures hold the spotlight. The image Magic Show, for example, is taken in front of Jackson Square. A white sign bears the hand written words: Bird Man Magic Show. Sitting on top of a partially covered cage with two doves inside, a pigeon gawking in from outside, and a rolling pedestal draped with a piece of cloth with a spike on top, and a full bag stuffed underneath a small step stool; these details steal our attention. We are left wondering, “Where is this Bird Man?” not “Oh, it’s Jackson Square.” The images together show the quirkier side of New Orleans. Couvillion presents his viewers places they may have ventured to on occasion, along with the subjects they may have missed, scenes they may have overlooked or never thought to notice.

Tuyen Nguyen.

In a duet of pieces dealing entirely with gender, its differentiations, and their acquisition, Artist Maxx Sizeler offers an unusual interpretation. Gender characteristics begin to manifest themselves at an early age through both learned behaviors. These learned behaviors are often unconsciously or knowingly imposed upon the child by the child’s parents, mentors, and peers. In line with Judith Butler, Sizeler offers the definition of gender as “the performance by which one interprets biology. It also includes the language that describes performances such as “man,” and “woman.” The subject matter of the installation is comprised mostly of the analysis of varying forms of gener, where a hybrid form is manifested. In a combination of two pieces, the first titled Subterfuge, and the second named Gender-Auto-Mobile, Sizeler begins to illustrate the conflicts of society’s approach to gender orientation and its performance. In a combination of stereotypically gendered shapes and colors, the incongruities are made visible. Subterfuge displays a baby’s crib containing a small toy truck on a track that revolves around a larger pink shoe/truck hybrid. Gender-Auto-Mobile, is a large child’s mobile depending from which is an assortment of truck/shoe composites situated directly above the crib. The shape of a blue truck represents an obvious symbol for masculinity, while the shape of a pink high-heeled platform shoe becomes a representation of conventionalized femininity. In the process of combining these two forms, as well as their concomitant colors, Sizeler arrives at a gender fusion form in yellow. The entire theme of the work certainly discusses the social encouragement of gender orientation and conformity in small children, specifically here in newborns. From birth, people give their children toys and tools that steer the infant in one particular direction or the other. The main narrative here derives from Sizeler’s scrutiny of that fact. There should be no real reason for this to occur, yet we still deem it not just appropriate, but necessary. Although there are debatable advantages as well as disadvantages to having such gender roles, they are completely extraneous to the life of the individual except insofar as they block the development of complexity and structure cognitive development artificially.

Nick Sherman

In a piece titled Conglomerate, artists Natalie Sciortino and Jeff Rinehart have collaborated to produce a pair of still-life photographs. There are two large prints, both of which are displayed upside-down with one placed directly above the other. The top photograph, depicting a sculptural construction of seemingly everyday objects is colorized quite vividly in various hues of deep red and pink. Feathers, bottles of water, a small photograph, and other miscellaneous items make up the composition. The symbolism of the items seems to be left up to the viewer’s interpretation, as there is very little tangible evidence to derive a singular conclusion. Below the top photograph sits a deeply contrasting mirror image, given away by the presence of a familiar element seen in the opposing print. Upon further investigation, the viewer may notice that it is actually the same sculptural arrangement, albeit from a different perspective. In addition to the altered perspective, the exposure and lighting by which the picture was taken have been drastically altered. With its intense shadow-black ambience, it has a much more inauspicious and foreboding attitude. The fact that the viewer cannot actually see the entirety of the sculpture provokes an element of curiosity that the rival image fails to demand. Both images, in comparison, certainly represent a binary opposition of some kind. If we assume that the photographs are taken of the same subject by two different artists we begin to divine a narrative in which the apparent formal discussion may be subordinated to the specifity of vision revealed by the contrasting images. The two parts make a whole, the artists are a couple. I defy anyone to assume that pinkness, detail, or inclusiveness may belong to the female party while chiaroscuro, specificity and blackness belong to the man. Look again. This work is so slick it might just satisfy you before you see everything that’s really here, yet alone consider its implications.

Nick Sherman

Murphy’s photographic series captures the essence of light and water where Bayou St. John meets lake Ponchatrain. He captures the geometry of the overhead bridges, some flowing in a perfectly straight continuum while others shift shades from light to dark, as they hit the water. These black and white photographs are intense studies in geometry and light, with stark contrasts in value. They are peaceful, serene in their formal commentary on form, in their recognition that beauty can emerge from man’s interventions in the natural world.

James W. Goedert

In a departure from his customary practice as a painter, Jose Maria Cundin recontextualizes the obelisk in this series of sculptures. Each piece has a touch of humor within a political and social statement. Structures that are most often used to convey status and position have been altered in various ways to transform their purpose. Cundin’s “Mobile Obelisk”, for example, has been fashioned with wheels, so as to make this permanent object a beacon that can be passed from power to power, and place to place, denying all conventional wisdom about the permanency of monolithic statuary. The “Unstable Obelisk” sits upon a pedestal with a half-moon shaped base. This brightly colored sculpture functions as a pendulum or a metronome, skewing its conventional meanings to their fullest extent. Each obelisk has a unique visual element added to spur reflection and undercut convention for the attentive viewer.

James W. Goedert.

Sullivan’s “Sunset Refinery” meets its viewers in a room filled with sound and video wrapped within a space floor-to-ceiling with grocery bags. The intriguing drone that populates the room with sounds resembling crickets and barges falls in line with the screen as orb after orb transforms into calligraphic line. There is a quality of space that is seldom captured as it is in this animation. A cosmic backdrop allows willowy lines to wrap within and around themselves in a kaleidoscope of colors, playing amongst the continuously expanding and contracting oil-like spheres. This mysterious projection loop is one that cannot easily be captured in words. It must be viewed whole and absorbed as an experience.

James W. Goedert

James W. Goedert

Ryan Burns’ large tree stump rubbings in this series, titled ‘Biodiscourse’, deals specifically with deforestation and the resulting harmful affects to our planet. The series documents “the felling of Pacific Northwest Old Growth Forests” which are falling victim to the world’s growing demand for paper. In his statement he notes that “71% of the world’s current paper supply is made from the world’s remaining intact old growth forests which are the most biodiverse forests.” Commenting on the loss of biodiversity and the increase in global warming due to increased level of CO2, Burns responds by making his work out of recycled papers and the remains of those tree stumps left behind after old growth forests are clear cut. The two pieces in the St. Claude show are untitled except for the reference to materials, which have meaning with reference to their location and the age of the tree from which they are drawn. One of the two pieces is titled Untitled (Douglas Fir, est. age 221 years) offering the viewer a historical reference to the time and space no longer occupied by the approximately five foot square ‘finger print’ revealed by Burns’s visual documentation. “I consider these rubbings the finger prints of the severed giants that once held our planet’s thermostat in place” he explains.

The pieces themselves are described as “large format collages with discarded paper used to make rubbings of old growth stumps recording the impressions of the annual growth rings.” They are extremely beautiful; his use of yellowing, weathered papers, wallpapers, and topographical maps reveal the idea that the land does not belong to the tree anymore. The irony continues as each tree’s ‘finger print’ is documented on the material it was torn down to produce.

Ryan Burns was born in Cincinnati, Ohio; attended the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, and shows his work in Barristers Gallery, New Orleans.

Alex Gelpi.

Peter Woods is a Caucasian folk artist from Cleveland, Ohio and makes self conscious work about the society of the inner city African American. Growing up in an environment similar to those he depicts, he consciously creates a commentary about being “white” and painting traditionally “black” subject matter. He and his wife are both artists and professional house sitters and spend much of their time in Mexico. Perhaps perversely, his work can be purchased in the House of Blues gift store in the French Quarter.

Alex Gelpi.

Peering through the small entryway to look into Patrick Lichty’s installation Duchamp Goes to Fema (A Mile of Red Tape) one notices the disarray, the randomness, the haphazard placement and chaotic state of this inaccessible space. Red and yellow caution tape is strewn around the room, pinned tight to create a repetition of straight angles which render the space impenetrable. Plywood sheathing is visible like band-aids on unfinished walls and floors. Lights that do not properly illuminate the space lie uselessly abandoned, on and off in a random fashion. Wires hang from the ceiling and rest lazily on the floor and the viewer is hit with a stark reality—no one is coming to fix this mess.

As Lichty makes clear in the statement accompanying the installation, he “makes visible the administrative and existential troubles that the people have had in Southern Louisiana with hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Gustav.” He believes, as revealed by the installation, that “the rebuilding of New Orleans is far from complete…” and extends this allegory to encompass the whole direction of the United States Government, saying, “This piece is also a larger metaphor for the administrative nightmare that the Unites States has become…unprecedented government bureaucratic expansion has taken place, slowing domestic actions to geological timeframes.” The ‘red tape’ refers to the bureaucracy that has prevented people from returning home to New Orleans in time to rebuild their lives as it refers to the consistent increase in ‘red tape’ throughout the country.

Patrick Lichty is a digital intermedia designer, writer, independent curator, and artist whose work focuses on the effect of technology on society and how it shapes individual perspectives of the world. He works in an array of media that includes printmaking, kinetics, video, generative music, and neon. The basis of his work “has been to explore concepts and issues relating to narrative, sociology/ethnography, activism, or criticism.” His kinetic installation Duchamp Goes to Fema demonstrates his purposeful use of activism and criticism in his work. It also reverberates for a community that has consistently refused to accept the consequences of the technological world, a city where restoration is prioritized over renewal, where tradition is a continuing goal and not, as too often assumed, merely a nostalgia.

Alex Gelpi.

“Running through my veins” is a translation of Hayeren or the Armenian passage written along the bottom of Hasmig Vartanian’s large construction-type painting. It serves well in summarizing the theme of this very human piece. Canvas, torn into strips and painted red, creates a surface texture resembling the system of capillaries and veins beneath our skin. The deep black and painterly strokes intermingled throughout the torn red canvas remind the viewer of this intimate and usually unseen space within the human body. A space not penetrated by light. The large black symbol central to the piece occupies a space carved into the canvas, brutally made “one” with the piece. Connections, yellow and brighter than the surrounding atmosphere, appear within the symbol, perhaps suggesting hope in this dark, impenetrable place.

In the past Hasmig Vartanian has created large series of softer yellow and tan constructive paintings that feature collage as a unifying theme, some of which have been described as “flowery”. This piece represents a different approach to a more personal experience of the darkness found within the constraints of physicality.

Alex Gelpi.

In a tiny nook, old doors, yellowed newspapers, broken plantation shutters encase the tight confines of Elizabeth Shannon’s tightly packed installation. New Orleans Jazz escapes from the installation luring viewers into her space. Leaning forward, looking through the muddy windows of what appears to be an old front door, there is a light. Moving closer, smelling old books, newspapers and wood, there appears to be a ladder at the far wall behind the door. Upon closer inspection shelves lining both walls become apparent and placed neatly on the shelves are large bowls of teeth, skulls, and other bones. There is also a stuffed doe’s head lying on its side, an old drum, books, aprons hanging from a nail, and jars and jugs of things collected and saved that are unrecognizable through the muddied glass. Perhaps this installation is representative of a taxidermist’s workspace? Or simply the world as the artist herself has collected it? The mood is one of remembrance: looking back at the old, the fragile, and the deceased through the muddied memories of lost albums, homes, and lifetimes. It is about collecting, storing, and preserving things that are precious or meaningful. It is about not letting go of something because it is no longer useful, and instead clinging to it for its own sake and for the preservation of the memories it has come to represent.

In the statement accompanying her installation, Shannon writes of the found object as something that should be reclaimed, re-examined, and restored in order to achieve a rebirth-a deep exhaling from those with a recycling mind. This is her main focus, nothing wasted, and everything kept. She is keeping everything, collecting everything and whether she has a purpose is unimportant. Old doors, newspapers, books-nothing in this installation is new-everything is found and collected to create this vision of broken memories.

These memories, these bones, reflect the life of the artist. Elizabeth Shannon is a Sculptor and Alligator Trapper who was raised in the bayou and swamp country of Morgan City, Louisiana. She currently lives in the Marigny in Old Franklin Temperance Hall with fellow sculptor Clifton G. Webb and is known for creating narrative installations using Alligators, ladders, cow skulls and many more recycled objects which form part of her life, its explorations and its history.

Alex Gelpi.