Dan’s work
Camelot After The Deluge,
(Series of 12 Photographs)
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: Read the rest of this entry »
Malcom’s work
(Interactive Installation)
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael’s work
Badlands,
Computer Animation
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: Read the rest of this entry »
Douglas’ work
(Welcome to the Gulf, Acrylic and Mixed Media. 6 panels, fused into three. )
“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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Sean Star Wars describes himself as an “outlaw printmaker” and that is precisely what his addition to the St. Claude Collective show calls to mind. As an outlaw, he has created a wall of massive woodcuts of all shapes, sizes, and colors and created the most wonderful relief print collage. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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”. Read the rest of this entry »
Hurricane Katrina ravaged the entire city of New Orleans. The torrential rain and flooding left many homes and structures devastated. Following the destruction, erosion and decay set in as mold and mildew began to overwhelm what was left of the entirety of this city. Dawn Dedeaux’s work is strangely reminiscent of much of what was seen, and can still be seen in some cases, in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The black and brown splotches, resembling some form of organic malignancies, are especially suitable given the current setting. There are four paintings in Dawn’s piece. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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
Adam Farrington has created for our delectation a large steel sculpture titled Monster with Possession, 2008. It stands on multiple legs, with pod-like segmented sections. Standing about 7 feet tall, it is insect-like with many threateningly protruding pieces. The torso of the monster has multiple insets in various uncomfortable looking shapes. His monster is a commanding creature, its presence is palpably, unavoidably in possession.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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; Read the rest of this entry »
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). Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Natalie Sciortino & Jeff Rinehart’s work
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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
Bradshaw’s “Ponchatrain Hurricane Series” installs rustic exploded aluminum, mangled beyond utility, upon the gallery wall. These remnants of staple building materials appear to be fleeing from their surfaces half way between decay and repair. Each of the pieces has arrived in a unique state. Within the fabric-like folds are harbored different levels of oxidation, bleeding out into areas of virgin metal. These objects stand alone and together as depictions of decay that lead away from the possibility of return to the necessity of change.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Extremely narrative and political, Peter Wood’s series of paintings speak of a dualistic perspective on society as specifically understood in New Orleans. Images of a divided man, a man in “two-face”, smash together separate groups of people: those who prioritize wealth and those who value honest living. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
“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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »