Tagged: fine art
Mardi Garage: Herb Roe, Festival International de Louisiane and a Prime Location
Herb Roe, “Courir de Mardi Gras – Number 14″, oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″, 2010, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Courir de Mardi Gras – Valse du Vacher”, oil on canvas, 24″ x 36″, 2012, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Courir de Mardi Gras – McGee’s Medley”, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″, 2013, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Tee Courir – Number 27″, oil on canvas, 5″ x 7″, 2013, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Tee Courir – Number 29″, oil on canvas, 7″ x 5″‘, 2013, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Danse a’ Cheval II”, graphite on paper, 18″ x 24″, 2012, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Cajun Fiddler I”, hand-painted lino block print, 10″ x 12″, 2012, photograph courtesy of the artist
Herb Roe, “Cajun Fiddler II”, hand-painted lino block print, 10″ x 12″, 2012, photograph courtesy of the artist
by Reggie Rodrigue
It’s late April, and Mardi Gras is just a memory in our collective rearview mirror in Louisiana. However, the bon temps keep rolling! Festival International de Louisiane is about to kick off this Wednesday, April 24, 2013 in Lafayette, LA. This 5-day world music festival juggernaut,”featuring six music stages, food court areas, street musicians and animators, arts and crafts boutiques, art galleries, beverage stands, cultural workshops, international cooking demonstrations and a world music store,” (www.festivalinternational.com) will take over Downtown Lafayette for another year.
In the midst of all of the international frivolity will be Lafayette artist Herb Roe. For this year’s installment of Festival International de Louisiane, Roe has decided to open an exhibition of his “Courir de Mardi Gras” paintings, drawings and prints in the Garage, located at 205B West Vermillion St., Lafayette, LA, which is – surprise, surprise – a former garage. The location itself will be ideal for viewing Roe’s work as the Garage will be right beside the Vermilion St. Open Market once Festival begins.
To anyone from outside South Louisiana, Roe’s “Courir de Mardi Gras” works may seem like something out of a Surrealist phantasmagoria, with their grotesque depictions of otherworldly protagonists running amok in a bucolic setting. However, Roe is a died-in-the-wool realist painter, and his “Courir de Mardi Gras” works faithfully depict what the celebration of Mardi Gras in rural South Louisiana actually looks like in real life – minus the occasional post-apocalyptically red sky (You can’t keep it real all the time – as any Dave Chappelle fan knows). In Roe’s work, one comes face-to-face with the bizarre yet rich tradition of the rural Mardi Gras.
Participants in the celebration make their own costumes, replete with homemade mesh masks and conical dunce caps. They ride on horseback through the small towns of Acadiana, creating mischief, teasing young children, performing feats of daring and chasing chickens donated by locals for the communal gumbo pot to be shared at the end of the day. In rural Acadiana, Mardi Gras is a day when the natural order of things is overturned and mayhem and merriment rule before the Catholic fasting season of Lent begins.
What’s especially engaging about Roe’s work is the perspective he has on this Louisiana tradition – for Roe isn’t originally from Louisiana. He was born in Ohio, and spent his childhood and adolescence between that state and Kentucky. Roe’s work with Lafayette, LA muralist Robert Dafford lead him to the Hub City and the subject of his current work. Certainly, he has spent a great deal of time living and working in Louisiana – enough to be considered a local by our standards. Yet, in his paintings of the Courir de Mardi Gras, one begins to understand his unique perspective of being an outsider on the inside track to one of Louisiana’s most mysterious and mystifying cultural experiences. Roe’s application of paint is almost clinical and diagnostic in it’s realism, and points toward his status as an observer outside of the scenarios which he is depicting. However, the scenarios are so removed from the daily currents of normal life that Roe’s realism is swallowed up in the tidal flow of color, pattern and pageantry that he is depicting. In this way, the wall between observer and participant breaks down in much the same way that the Mardi Gras celebration breaks down societal inhibitions and hierarchies. When viewing Roe’s “Courir de Mardi Gras” works, one succumbs to the ecstatic, drunkenness of the images in all of their obsessively detailed, hyperrealistic, stranger-than-fiction glory. They are a profound visual treat for anyone, whether you’re from Mamou, LA, Moscow or Madagascar, and the perfect visual accompaniment for the joyous celebration that is Festival International de Louisiane.
Herb Roe’s “Courir de Mardi Gras” exhibition at the Garage (205B West Vermillion St., Lafayette, LA) will be open during Festival International’s officially scheduled hours. For further information on Festival times and other Festival related information, visit its website, http://festivalinternational.com/site.php.
To visit Herb Roe’s artist website, follow this link: http://www.chromesun.com/
“My Eye” on Louisiana: The Works of Kerry Griechen
All photographs by Kerry Griechen, courtesy of the artist and My Eye Photography
by Reggie Rodrigue
Having a wandering eye is typically not something of which to be proud – unless one is a photographer. In that case, having a wandering eye is essential. Curiosity about the physical world around oneself and the intense obsession with capturing an image of it either objectively or subjectively (and who can really tell the difference between the two anymore) is the basis for all of photography. Mature photographers typically focus on one or two particular corners of reality; however, every serious photographer I know started his career with an indomitable drive to document his life and travels in light, photographing everything that his insatiable eye could consume until he found a subject or a process that truly spoke to him.
Lafayette, LA‘s Kerry Griechen is a photographer of many things. However, his eloquence comes to the fore when he is focusing on the natural wonders, urban landscape, and people of South Louisiana. Griechen’s body of work offers viewers a dazzling and beautiful mosaic of life in the region from a mother roseate spoonbill feeding her fledgling in the wild or the time-worn pastiche of a decrepit warehouse facade to a New Orleanian starting his day by hosing-off a French Quarter sidewalk.
In truth, none of these subjects may be particularly new or novel to South Louisiana’s native population. They may not even be new or novel to people outside of the state. There isn’t much in the way of disquieting or provocative imagery in Griechen’s photographs. He isn’t exploring some esoteric or conceptual process in his photography, either; although, he does dabble in Photoshop techniques every once in a while to highly mixed results that veer toward the dismissible. Therefore, some avant guardists may wonder about the artistic merit of such work. One can hear their groans: “Beauty for beauty’s sake? Bah! Humbug! Bring me an MFA grad who eats glass, takes photographs of his excrement and subjects said photographs to a complex chemical process that renders them illegible! Now that’s art!” That may very well be art in the right hands, but a straight-forward, beautiful image of the world can be art as well – in the right hands. Griechen proves this over and over.
In his most arresting photographs, Griechen focuses his sharp eye for composition, pattern, texture and color on mostly solitary figures and quiet moments devoid of any human presence. Through his simple process, he manages to mine some complex and layered images of Southern Louisiana that are both mundane, serene and, simultaneously, breath-taking in their attention to detail. When other people may walk past a dirty, brick wall festooned with an electrical meter, water pipes and graffiti, Griechen sees an opportunity to zoom-in tightly on the particulars and create a quasi-abstraction that would look smart beside a Kandinsky. The combination of a fence and the corner of an Acadian house with a stairway leading to its garconniere offered another photographic opportunity to Griechen: in this instance, he deftly exploited the angles of the architecture to create an image of visual complexity to rival any of M.C. Escher‘s imaginary labyrinths. Griechen has taken a photograph of a walking path surreptitiously created between a group of sugarcane harvesting trucks that visually echoes a path through an autumnal wood. He captures lush, green water lily pads or cypress trees framing and offering a sense of depth and scale to lone and elegant egrets in the wild. He finds visual drama and dynamics in an open doorway which leads from the blunt geometry of a worn, green French Quarter wall to a luxurious and inviting courtyard or the sight of a rainbow as seen through the nets hanging from a trawling boat. He also finds something poetic in the sight of a man putting away a pack of cigarettes into his jeans pocket while lingering in the doorway of a New Orleans tourist trap. To come full circle – if one looks closely to the left portion of this image, one can spy a three-quarter profile view of the graffitied wall mentioned at the top of this paragraph.
It’s no secret that in many respects, Griechen is tackling some well-worn, cliched Louisiana subjects, but it is the depth and precision of his response that rescues them from banality and superficiality. That, in and of itself, is an art. There is something to be said for a body of work that simply and effectively renews one’s interest in the world around oneself with all of its wonder and beauty. For all of those people who cannot accept an unabashedly beautiful, if somewhat conventional, image as art, I have this to say: artistic rigor is one thing; artistic rigor mortis is another thing, entirely. Too many artists these days confuse artistic rigor with difficulty, obtuseness and the idea that beauty is anathema when beauty (whichever way it is achieved) is really the name of the game and the game itself.
Some people find beauty in nature or the streets. Some people find beauty in geometry or abstraction. Others find beauty in ideas. Some find beauty in sexually charged material or blood, guts and excrement, and others find beauty in nothing.
However, the best people find beauty in everything!
Kerry Griechen is currently exhibiting his work in Lafayette Consolidated Government’s City Hall building on the corner of University Ave. and St. Landry St. in Lafayette, LA until the first week of May 2013.
To view more works by Griechen online, visit his website www.myeyephotos.com
Pattern Recognition: Stephanie Patton and Troy Dugas at Arthur Roger Gallery
by Reggie Rodrigue
Stephanie Patton, “Intersection,” vinyl, batting and muslin, 2013, 62 x 60 x 4 inches, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Troy Dugas, “Rye Whiskey Blue,” vintage labels mounted to paper, 2012, 72 x 72 inches, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Patterns. They’ve always held a fascination for us. We divine them from nature. We see them emerge in our own lives. We reconstruct them. We interpret, alter and interpolate them.
In truth, being able to see, recognize and interpret patterns is crucial to the survival of the human species. Without some sort of pattern recognition, no higher-order organism could function or survive or be called a higher-order organism, for that matter. This is because pattern is intrinsically linked to organization. Pattern is in our DNA, our brain structure, along with the rest of creation.
Pattern is also that upon which we build our digital lives and affect change in the real world of the 21st century. In the digital realm, we use complex algorithms – a finite set of mathematical procedures performed in a proscribed sequence – to compute vast amounts of data that would otherwise be impossible to do without algorithms. From these computations, we can begin to interpret patterns in the data. By doing so, we can better understand a pattern that may be an invisible or underlying cause of an issue which confronts us such as climate change, traffic flow or any number of other complex problems that are bigger than one mind can bear.
Currently at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, two Lafayette, LA artists who bring pattern to the fore in their own works are exhibiting: Stephanie Patton and Troy Dugas. Within both bodies of work, the two artists begin with a simple premise, a minimum of materials, and a highly repetitive process. However, their finalized works speak to the complexity, beauty and meaning that can unfold from such humble and rudimentary origins.
Stephanie Patton is a multimedia artists who currently lives and works in between Lafayette, LA and New Orleans, LA. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1993 and an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. After this, she spent some time living in New York City, engaging in the art scene there as well as taking classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she honed her skills as a comedian. In 2001, Patton returned to Lafayette, LA and continues to grow her career as an artist as well as an educator. She also became a member of the wildly successful New Orleans artists’ collective, The Front.
Stephanie Patton, “Strength,” vinyl, batting and muslin, 2013, 79 x 79 x 15 inches, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Stephanie Patton, “Valor,” vinyl, batting and muslin, 2013, 81 x 81 x 15 inches, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Stephanie Patton, “Meeting,” vinyl, batting and muslin, 2013, 55 x 86 x 17 inches, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Patton’s exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery is titled “Private Practice.” The title is now part of a running joke with Patton’s work. Her last exhibition at The Front was titled “General Hospital.” Both titles refer to soap operas/dramas centered around doctors and medical environments.While the thought of naming one’s art exhibition after such processed cheese from television is extremely humorous, there is another point to the titles. They offer a point of entry and a certain amount of accessibility for the viewing of Patton’s Postminimalist works. The titles – with their allusions to drama, tension, sickness, healing and recovery – give viewers a clue that Patton’s works are more than just exercises in design and pattern.
Most of the works on display in “Private Practice” are quilted and shaped wall sculptures composed of white vinyl, batting and muslin, which hover and undulate before the viewer like some sort of hybrid between a cloud, a work by Frank Stella and a mandala. The works are anodyne, yet forceful and rigorous. Patton has found a way to take soft materials associated with rest and transmute them into a series of objects that speak of strength, presence, perseverance, and healing. It is an impressive feat, and viewing these pieces puts one in the frame of mind to think about, not only the more abstract and metaphysical ideas engendered in the work but, also, the thought, time, work, skill and care that went into sewing and composing it.
Stephanie Patton, “Conquer,” Video, 8 minutes 8 seconds, 2013, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
The real tour-de-force of Patton’s exhibition is a video, however. “Conquer” is 8 minutes and 8 seconds of gut-wrenching pain and claustrophobia followed by sublime relief and stoic transcendence. The video begins with a close-up of Patton’s head, neck and shoulders covered in a tight latticework of band-aids which gives her the look of a badly sculpted, clay bust. She stands before her work “Intersection.” The work acts as a formal backdrop to the action in the video. The action begins with Patton searching for an appropriate band-aid to pull. She finds one, and then … RIP! The pain of the action is palpable, and it just keeps going for what seems like an eternity of band-aid ripping; however, it is riveting. One winces and squirms while Patton steadily removes her dummy mask, keeping time with the sounds of her breathing and those nearly interminable separations of adhesive bandage from flesh. By the end of the video, Patton’s full face emerges from its cocoon. One can almost feel the blood coursing through her inflamed skin. Her wide, watery eyes stare out at the viewer with a startling amount of restraint; yet, there is also much in the way of clarity, openness and beauty in her gaze as well. It’s a brief moment of silent reflection and equanimity … and a challenge to the viewer to move through whatever pain is stifling his/her life into a similar state of unshakable grace.
If you would like to view Stephanie Patton’s video “Conquer,” please follow this link to the Arthur Roger Gallery website.
Troy Dugas, “St. Jerome #4,” European liquor labels on paper, 60 x 60 inches, 2012, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Troy Dugas, “Fragancia,” cigar labels on cut paper, 47 x 47 inches, 2013, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
Speaking of unshakable grace, artist Troy Dugas has that in spades as well. One needs such things to produce work at the same caliber as Dugas’ vintage label collages.
Dugas graduated with a BFA from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1994. In 1998, he received his MFA from the Pratt Institute. He currently lives and works in Lafayette, LA.
Early in his professional life, Dugas began working with a particular form of collage that involves using duplicates of the same image, rather than the usual pastiche of dissimilar images and materials that typifies most collage. To put it in mathematical terms (which somehow seems fitting), if the usual form of collage is a process of addition, then Dugas’ form of collage is a process of multiplication – amplifying a single element into what seems like an ecstatic, geometric infinity of pattern. In earlier works, Dugas used identical, vintage prints of ships at sea and flower arrangements to create images that mimicked what one would see if one were to look at the original images through a prismatic lens or the compound eyes of an insect.
Today, the focus of Dugas’ work is on creating abstract designs, second-hand portraits and still lifes with large quantities of vintage product labels.
Dugas abstract works mimic sacred geometry, calling to mind the sort of patterns one would find in a church, mosque or temple. From afar, they take the form of mandalas and are quite meditative in their overall impact.
For the uninitiated, the shock comes when one realizes that these exquisite works are made of old labels for liquor, cigars, fish and canned vegetables, among other commodities. At first, discovering this is a wonderful surprise; however, if one thinks about the meaning behind such work long enough, one reaches a gray area where marketing and spirituality rub shoulders a little to comfortably with one another. This forces one to wonder whether these are glorified advertisements or the sincere works of an artist on his own spiritual path. Personally, I tend to think the latter is closer to the truth.
In an age where everything, including our own digital lives on social media websites, is a product to be marketed and advertised ad nauseum, it is difficult to find a space for reflection and spiritual pursuit that eludes the dictates of “the market.” While Dugas’ works are certainly part and parcel of the overall system of capitalism (they are being sold at New Orleans’ poshest gallery after all) and are composed of the refuse of this system, they still manage to take the viewer somewhere beyond the daily grind of consumption – a space of pure, Platonic freedom.
Dugas is involved in a game of extreme subversion. He begins a work with a pile of the lowest form of art and creates something wholly ineffable and transitive. In the context of our time, there is something truly transgressive about Dugas’ work in that it exudes skill (countering the prevailing rubric of “deskilling” in art today), it obviously takes much time and patience to complete it (two things of which most people have very little these days), and most importantly it turns pop culture and pop art on its head. Given enough green bean labels and time, Dugas can create a work of art on par with a Byzantine mosaic or a Buddhist mandala. He metaphorically takes Warhol’s soup can and runs with it in the other direction. By slicing and dicing commodity labels into a million little pieces and recontextualizing them, Dugas points to a way out of the consumerist paradigm by diving right into and through it.
Troy Dugas, “Fayum Clos du Calvaire,” European liquor labels on wood panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2012, photogrpah courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
However, Dugas has recently decided to go in other directions as far as the type of images he produces. His “Fayum” series is a case in point. The product labels have remained a constant and pattern still plays a key role in shaping the work, but Dugas deploys these to compose representational images which riff on the tradition of Coptic Fayum painting. This type of work flourished in Egypt during the Roman occupation of the country at the tale end of the Roman Empire.
Fayum paintings were typically made of encaustic or tempera on wood panel, and they represented living portraits of deceased individuals. These portraits were painted during an individual’s lifetime, displayed in his/her home, and then placed over the head of his/her mummy as a reminder of what the deceased looked like when he/she was alive. Fayum paintings were basically the Graeco-Roman innovation on the ancient Egyptian funerary mask.
While unequivocally beautiful, Dugas’ “Fayum Series” complicates an already complex and hybridized tradition. These works have a particular sort of resonance for our time, bringing to mind the collapse of a civilization (possibly our own included); the atemporality of our digital age where information, ideas, art, and design from vastly different eras coexist through various media simultaneously and are equally valued; an exploration of the colonialist impulses of much modern art such as Picasso and Matisse’s osmotic response to African art and our own colonialist polemics in the Middle East today; and a porous view of individual identity. Beside the infiltration of corporate logos in these works replicating ancient funerary paintings of people who actually were alive at one point in time, Dugas throws another conceptual monkey wrench in the proceedings by basing some of the works in the series on contemporary arrest photographs found on the internet. It’s a chilling touch that begs viewers to answer the uncomfortable question of what posterity and history have in store for them.
Troy Dugas, “Still Life Cactus,” assorted labels mounted to wood panel, 28 x 35 inches, 2013, photograph courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery
The specter of modernism haunts Dugas’ “Still Life” Series a little more lightly than his “Fayum” Series, if no less significantly. Here, Dugas breaks with his convention of using a single type of label. He employs an unprecedented assortment of labels to approximate the varying colors, textures and techniques utilized in modernist still lifes. Dugas’ obsessive technique seems to loosen in these works, affording them a sense of playfulness and breezy, if scattered, sensuality.
Together, Patton and Dugas’ current artworks afford viewers vital insight into the ways pattern can be more than simple decoration. Before the onset of modernism and postmodernism in Western culture, there was much meaning invested in pattern. Viewed as symbols of status and origin, pattern was used as a tool to visually order and label the world around oneself. Because of this, every pattern had a fixed meaning. This view of pattern generally broke down under the influence of the modernist impulse to purge symbolism from visual culture. Postmodernism then relegated pattern to being a handmaiden to style and design. The beauty of the contemporary use of pattern is that now it has a freedom of use unafforded to it in the past and it can carry a plethora of meanings depending on its contextualization. This is because we approach pattern from a multitude of different perspectives in our own contemporary moment.
With Patton and Dugas, we have two examples of contemporary artists reinvigorating past forms and materials within new contexts. Their works hold the mirror up to our own complex lives in subtle yet profound ways, unearthing and reflecting undercurrents and patterns of reality. We are given the responsibility of recognizing the patterns and determining their significance.
Stephanie Patton’s “Private Practice” and Troy Dugas’ “The Shape of Relics” are both on view at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans until April 20, 2013.
Signs, Signs! Everywhere There’s Signs!
by Reggie Michael Rodrigue
A cover of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the novel “The Great Gatsby,” the penultimate meditation on the dark heart of America in the Roaring 20′s, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces his readers to a profoundly denatured landscape – a modern wasteland – known as the Valley of Ashes. It is a toxic zone where industrial ash is dumped between the embarrassingly affluent, new money enclave of West Egg, Long Island and the bright lights and big dreams of New York City. In the context of the novel, the Valley of Ashes symbolizes the spiritual, social and environmental decay that is the end result of a life spent in the unbridled pursuit of wealth, consumption and pleasure at any cost.
An ashpile
Within Fitzgerald’s wasteland, particular interest is paid to signage and advertisements. As the American economic engine of the 1920′s raced into its seemingly dazzling future with the fury of a hellbent Duesenberg after WWI, advertising was there to stoke it’s fire. Consumerist culture reached a new apex in the 1920′s due in large part to the nascent proliferation of newspapers, magazines, leaflets, billboards, electric/neon signage and radio. All of these media converged on the nation and advertised the latest and greatest innovations to a public desperate to move past the horrors of the war into a modern, gleaming pleasure dome of unknown convenience and luxury.
The cultural landscape of the nation succumbed to desire, and Fitzgerald was keenly aware of this. The most potent and terrifying symbol in “The Great Gatsby” is not the Valley of Ashes itself, but a faded billboard located in this liminal zone. The billboard advertises the practice of occulist, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The billboard simply presents the large, bespectacled eyes of the doctor hovering over all of the desolation. On one hand, the billboard represents the eyes of God judging America from on high. On the other hand, the billboard obliquely represents an erosion of progressive vision and meaning in a land engulfed in wantonness and consumption. Fitzgerald seemed to be saying that when all of the images a people hold sacred are foisted back on them for the purposes of selling toothpaste, gasoline and soda, the world becomes meaningless and a vacant shell only suitable to be filled with more commodities and the refuse left behind after the act of consumption has taken place.
Recreation of the Valley of Ashes with Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s Billboard as described in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”
Nearly a century after Fitzgerald’s time, the transformation of America by capitalists and the media into the world’s used car lot is complete. Nearly every square inch of America has become mediated for the purposes of selling something, whether it’s cars, smart phones, breakfast cereal, insurance and healthcare, public schools, ideas and even you, dear reader. You’re being sold, too. Take some time to look up what a “data broker” is and delight in the fact that personal information about your life and what you buy is a commodity as well – to be schilled to corporations thanks to the ease of aggregating terabytes of data by way of the ubiquity of digital technology in our lives. The implications of this brave, new world of consumer data mining are vast. Whereas the media of the 20th century was all about creating large, singular marketing projects that were meant to carpet bomb the cultural landscape of the time for mass effectiveness, the media of the 21st has learned to be a lot more insidious and personal. After all, what company really needs billboards anymore, when said company can interact and send perfectly targeted advertisements to prospective consumers through Facebook and other social media sites selling your personal information, where the masses commune alone-together inside the pseudo-privacy of their digital bubbles.
In this sense, pop culture has begun to eat us and itself. We’ve begun to be nostalgic for a simpler time when pop was a high-wattage diner sign gleaming on the horizon, the kooky messages and curt phrases of letterboards or a homemade advertisement slapped together by a mom-and-pop store. To us in the 21st century, these things now seem quite Romantic-with-a-capital-R. The fact is that many of these artifacts of early consumerist culture are either in a state of half-life, ruin, or they are vanishing from the cultural landscape altogether. Inspect any new Apple Computer Store and take a whiff of what’s to come. This is the future- and this as well. Seamless consumption! Today, the Romance-quotient of earlier forms of advertising and marketing blooms like a cross between a Googie architecture sunburst and a Caspar David Friedrich painting of a gutted church in the wilderness. We remember the good old days of coming together in person under the auspices of that banal yellow Waffle House sign to worship Baal covertly in plain sight while stuffing our faces with hashbrowns, pork sausage patties and eggs, and it was good (even though Waffle Houses still dot the American landscape). How metamodern of us – to be nostalgic for something that is still with us, although in a degraded form! Amen!
The reason for all of my babble about advertising, consumerism and nostalgia is an art exhibition at May Gallery by two artists from Brooklyn, New York – Alli Miller and Trey Burns – in the St. Claude Arts District of New Orleans . The exhibition is titled “Wessel Castle,” a portmanteau derived from combining the beginning of pop artist Tom Wesselmann‘s surname with the “Castle” in White Castle, the burger chain known for deliciously shitty, little square burgers with steam holes in them that have attracted rabid fans across our nation – most notably the writers of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.”
Title wall for Alli Miller and Trey Burns “Wessel Castle” exhibition at May Gallery
Installation view of “Wessel Castle” with title wall at May Gallery
Installation view of “Wessel Castle” at May Gallery
Installation view of “Wessel Castle” at May Gallery
Installation View of “Wessel Castle” at May Gallery.
Images of Wesselmann’s works or White Castle chains are non-existent in the exhibition, but by invoking them, Miller and Burns set up a dialectic for the show that casts a pall over the exhibition while still evoking the Romantic. In the 1950′s and 1960′s, when Wesselmann and White Castle had hit their stride as cultural zeitgeists, they stood for a confluence of cultural ease, efficiency and sensual delight that was America’s promise at the time. Within “Wessel Castle”, we, the audience, are left with the abject physical and metaphysical fallout from such short-sighted lines of thought along with a heaping dose of nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated time.
The exhibition is mostly a photographic exploration of the cultural backwaters and architectural relics that fit into the rubric of what Wesselman and White Castle represent to us today. However, Miller and Burns’ images are all presented to us on a ground of Tyvek – the relatively new industrial insulating material which the long-standing, corporate giant Dupont advertises as “Superior protection against water and air infiltration. Improved energy efficiency & air quality.“
Tyvek is actually quite a humorous and ironic choice in which to cover the walls of the exhibition. Here, Miller and Burns exploit the material due to it’s connection to New Orleans, a city still in the process of rebuilding itself after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Visit any ward in the middle of a revitalization in New Orleans, and one will surely see Tyvek being placed on new homes and buildings. Tyvek was also the material of choice for the protective suits worn by first responders and clean-up crews after the hurricane. Beyond this connection, one can also view the Tyvek of the exhibition as a sly recreation of red carpet backdrops at major entertainment events that advertise which companies have supported the event proceedings with funding. The Tyvek background of “Wessel Castle” forces the viewer to question the sincerity of the nostalgic/Romantic photographs on view.
There is another questionable presentational device in the exhibition as well. Each wall-mounted photograph in the exhibition is presented in a frame with its protective, cardboard, cornice sleeves in tact. A quirky, little touch like this has a big impact, demanding one question the intent of the artists. Are the sleeves there to offer protection to the fragile images, or are they there to mock them as freshly minted commodities? Personally, I think that they do both.
Within the images of “Wessel Castle,” Miller and Burns point us toward a couple of strange roadside attractions and a preponderance of billboards and letterboards in various states of disarray.
In “Espresso,” the viewer is asked to contemplate the kitschy glory of a coffee shop housed inside a concrete replica of an American Indian tepee.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “Espresso,” photograph
“We Buy Gold” is a beautifully haunting image of a repurposed Waffle House sign hovering over a motel pool surrounded by trees. The combination of the reflective, blue water, shady trees and the deadpan audacity of the towering yellow sign advertising a pawn shop/gold exchange lure one into the image. The photograph is drowsy with cheap luxury and the sort of blue sky noir one finds in David Lynch films.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “We Buy Gold,” photograph
On one of their roadtrips, Miller and Burns were lucky enough to come across a Geico Insurance advertisement via skywriting. The photograph “Geico Geico” is the end result of this coincidence. Here, the name of the company hiccups across the sky in short puffs of smoke while a street light seems to reach up and underscore the advertisement.
In “Untitled (Road Signs),” a quartet of cacti are adorned with wooden ladders or supports for some mysterious reason. They rise in isolation from a desert landscape while vehicles and highway signs dot the horizon behind them.
In another photograph of a nearly barren landscape, “Museum Next Exit,” a shoddy, utilitarian sign advertises the near presence of culture behind a barbed wire fence.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “Museum Next Exit,” photograph
“Untitled (Memorial)” commemorates a hilltop site of remembrance capped by a white cross and a propped-up wooden rainbow. The image is equally beautiful and pathetic.
“Untitled (Geometric Sign)” presents the top of a disused and repurposed highway sign peeking out into a serene sky from the bottom of the photograph. What purpose this sign has now seems to be a mystery since all that occupies it in the image are modernistic blocks of color. Maybe the sign points the way to some type of secret Bauhaus utopia off one of America’s lost highways?
The last of the quasi-yet-hyper-surreal images in “Wessel Castle” is “Untitled (Double Horizon),” which provides the visual enigma of a painted desert landscape on a shipping container located in the middle of an actual desert landscape. It’s one of the smarter and more enchanting images in the exhibition. The artifice of the painting (despite its clumsy nature) seems more real by virtue of the stupendous bluntness and incongruence of the shipping container supporting it. It’s as if one can step into the landscape a second time through the painting on the container. “Untitled (Double Horizon)” one-ups the work of Rene’ Magritte and is a sly homage to the surrealist/advertising man who could also be a spiritual father of the work in the exhibition.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “Untitled (Double Horizon),” photograph
Along with the images above, one must wrestle with the achingly banal yet disconcerting images of abused, neglected or abandoned letterboard signs communicating gibberish in the midst of urban blight/sprawl or lonely stretches of the American landscape. The titles of the images like “B B OW E,” “GR EENL AWEBARBER P,” and “– P E C” telegraph the communication breakdown. The signs in these images have nothing and everything to say about where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going as a society. As Romantic landscape/memento mori, these images ask us to come to terms with our collective past as the world’s most recent divinely manifested consumers, and they remind us that today’s Facebook will inevitably be tomorrow’s disabused letterboard – only this time all that will remain will be data inside a digital cloud. That is if we and the cloud do survive.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “– P E C,” photograph
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “GR EENL AWEBARBER P,” photograph
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, ” B B OW E,” photograph
“Wessel Castle” also has some sculpture, but these 3-D stabs at the subject seem less successful than the photographs. Two pedestals made from what look to be wire crates each display two photographs. The gestures here seem rather glib, arbitrary and presumptive – as if the artists thought that their audience needed sculpture to complete the experience of the exhibition and neatly fit into the rubric of 21st century, multidisciplinary artodoxy (pun intended). Miller and Burns’ “Lightbox,” a plastic bin converted into an actual lightbox displaying a photograph of a brick wall with a badly painted trompe l’oeil chest of drawers inside the lid, is more of a success than the pedestals in that it is clever; however, it still seems unnecessary within the context of the exhibition. That also applies to the coat rack from which “We Buy Gold” hangs.
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “Pedestal #2 ‘Signscape’,” mixed media sculpture
Alli Miller and Trey Burns, “Lightbox,” mixed media sculpture
In summation, “Wessel Castle,” despite its small, 3-D disappointments, with its abject/pop/Romantic subject matter, is as formidable as it’s name implies in that it asks deep and timely questions about our collective values in this age of postpop hyperconsumption. We may have moved on to more ethereal, elegant, precise and intelligent ways of marketing ourselves in the 21st century, but so far, this has mostly just served as a means to continue to feed the voracious appetites we acquired in the past. Luckily, the beauty and wonder of the photographs in the exhibition make the contemplation of such things more palatable and also add another level of complexity to the exhibition. Within ‘Wessel Castle,” we see a glimpse from our society’s rear-view mirror, and the signs, objects and landscapes are unequivocally closer (and more complicated) than they seem.
** All photographs of “Wessel Castle” are courtesy of May Gallery
** For more information the May Gallery, click here.
As the Rooster Crows: The Saga of Lafayette’s Freetown Studios
Read all about Lafayette artist Susan David and the passion she has for her non-profit print shop/multi-media art center, Freetown Studios, in my article “As the Rooster Crows” here in Pelican Bomb, South Louisiana’s premier visual arts journal. Keep on cluckin’ my chickadees!
A video of Eugene J. Martin’s Work at the Turn of This Century
In honor of the upcoming retrospective of artist Eugene J. Martin‘s work at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, MS which runs from June 5, 2012 to December 1, 2012, we here at Louisianaesthetic thought it would be nice to share a video of Martin’s work which was completed at the dawn of the new millennium in his home studio in Lafayette, LA! Thanks to the efforts of his lovely and tenacious wife, Ms. Suzanne Fredericq and her efforts at www.eugenemartinart.com, we have this beautiful document! I hope you enjoy it!
Mystical Gathering: Eugene J. Martin at the Ohr-O’keefe Museum of Art
by Reggie Michael Rodrigue
On June 5, 2012, something magical will occur in the Gulfside town of Biloxi, MS. Two mystically inclined and fiercely iconoclastic bodies of work will meet and have a conversation inside a museum devoted to bringing the public closer to the mysterious heart of Southern art.
Inside the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, the work of George Ohr, “The Mad Potter of Biloxi,” is enshrined in the permanent collection there and acts as a lynch pin for the revolving exhibitions that take place on the campus. The museum was designed by the starchitect, Frank Gehry who is no stranger to iconoclastic and visionary gestures either. Inside Gehry’s ingenious complex, the spirit of Ohr and his own brand of Modernism reign. The artist was a product of the 19th Century and the overarching Victorian sensibility of his time; yet, Ohr struck out in a direction all his own with his pottery, anticipating the avant garde aesthetics of Modernism that defined the art of the 20th Century. Radical in his embrace of new form, brilliant color and the aesthetics of chance, Ohr was living and working by the Modernist mantra to “make it new” well in advance of poet Ezra Pound’s dictum.
Photograph of George Ohr. Courtesy of the Estate of George Ohr
Sculptural Vessel (Marbleized Clay) by George Ohr. Courtesy of the Estate of George Ohr
Much like Ohr, artist Eugene J. Martin possessed a radically independent spirit. He was born in Washington, DC, to a life of hardship and constant upheaval in 1938. However, rather than allowing his burdens to drag him down, Martin used them to temper his soul like the finest steel and forge a personality that was at ease in the eye of the creative storm that is a true artist’s life. For instance, Martin was an African American, and he began his studies at the Corcoran School of Fine Art at the dawn of Postmodernism in the 1960′s: a time when few black artists were allowed to enter the rarefied climes of Fine Art. He also lived in poverty through certain periods of his life, often without the means to acquire materials to feed his creativity. Yet, one can find very little evidence of any of these hardships in Martin’s art. This is because he was a self-made man and an artistic maverick who reveled in his own sense of freedom and personal identity within his own life and the wider history of art.
Rather than rejecting Modernism, Martin took the lessons of the fading period and made them his own, internalizing the work of Picasso, Matisse and Miro and breathing new life into their original concerns under the aegis of “satirical abstraction,” a term of the artist’s own creation. In Martin’s Modernist endgame, both abstraction and figuration participate in joyfully tenuous dances or rigorously tectonic tableau. One side of his oeuvre is gorgeously shambolic, located aesthetically somewhere between the dance of a whirling dervish and the insouciant libertinism of bodies moving to jazz or rock ‘n’ roll. The other side of his oeuvre is the playground of Euclide and Isaac Newton: a world of strict right angles, sumptuous curves and sacred geometries. The best of Martin’s work fuses these two sides, creating a sense that what is being depicted is caught between riotous motion and serene equipoise. It is in this fusion of gestural and geometric abstraction, along with figuration that alludes to human bodies, animals and machines, that Martin’s work succeeds and progresses past its antecedents. One other striking technique Martin used to reach new artistic horizons was collage and appropriation. Yet, he never used other artist’s work. He appropriated himself by cutting-up or taking photographs of his previous works and incorporating them into new structures. It is because of this mix and a renewed interest in Modernist practices that his work seems as alive, fresh and relevant today as the day Martin created it.
Eugene J. Martin at work in his home in Lafayette, LA. Courtesy of the Estate of Eugene J. Martin
Although he matured on the East Coast, Martin made his way to Lafayette, LA with his wife, biologist Suzanne Fredericq, in 1996. It was in Lafayette, that Martin continued to expand his ouevre for the better part of a decade until is death in 2005. Martin participated in a number of significant exhibitions in his lifetime, especially in Europe, but he never really received his proper dues from the artistic establishment in his own country. Martin’s slippery place in the continuum of art history is probably to blame for the neglect, as well as his fierce independence and resistance to categorization. This is about to change, however. Next month, Martin will receive a retrospective of his life’s work from the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. The exhibition is titled “The Art of Eugene Martin: A Great Concept” and will serve as somewhat of a time machine, connecting the proto-Modernism of Ohr to the Modernist denouement of Martin. It will also serve as a necessary corrective to the American establishment’s neglect of Martin’s work.
In anticipation of the exhibition, I made a pilgrimage to Martin’s home. His widow, Ms. Fredericq, was gracious enough to give me a tour of the home and the copious amount of brilliant work that Martin left behind. It was an experience I’ll never forget. The following pictures are a record of my visit. All photographs of the Martin home and Martin’s work were taken by the author.
“The Art of Eugene Martin: A Great Concept” will take place at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art from June 5, 2012 to Decmber 1, 2012. Louisianaesthetic will be presenting a follow-up article after visiting the exhibition in the near future.
For more information, visit the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art website here.
… and many thanks to Eugene Martin’s widow, Ms. Suzanne Fredericq
Promises, Promises!
Detail of Bullwinkle and Hammerhead (mural, ink and acrylic) by Johnathan “JJ” Wilson at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Detail of Bullwinkle and Hammerhead (mural, ink and acrylic) by Johnathan “JJ” Wilson at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Detail of Bullwinkle and Hammerhead (mural, ink and acrylic,2012) by Johnathan “JJ” Wilson at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, Adoration, assemblage, 2011, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, Adventure, assemblage, 2011, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, Connected, assemblage with live performance, 2012, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, Golden Girl, assemblage with live performance, 2012, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, sRGB 1EC61966-2.1, assemblage, 2011, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, The Commonwealth, assemblage with live performance, 2012, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
Patrick Segura, www, assemblage, 2011, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA
by Reggie Michael Rodrigue
By all indications, the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette is doing its job well (despite its quirks). Either that, or we in the Lafayette art scene are experiencing a great generational fluke in the guise of a bumper crop of amazingly gifted and promising young artists. Leading the pack are two recent graduates from ULL who are currently exhibiting some of the most forceful, intelligent, and innovative work that I’ve seen in this city in years at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.
Johnathan “JJ” Wilson is originally from Baton Rouge. After earning his BFA from ULL, he began to embed himself in the scene Downtown, and within a few months, he was curating the socially-minded exhibition Revolution No. 63 with co-curator Lillian Aguinaga. The exhibition highlighted the ever-expanding bike culture of Lafayette, along with its street culture. Their prescience in holding the exhibition in the newly opened, local apparel/print shop Parish Ink didn’t go unnoticed, either. Revolution No. 63 was the perfect polygamous marriage between art, social activism and commerce.
Wilson has moved on from Revolution No.63, as his current work at the ACA attests, but he certainly has not left the street. Wilson has installed a monumental mural in the Mallia Galleria atop the ACA’s lobby that rocks, hums, vibrates and pulses with youthful excess and bravado, while remaining wise and skillful. In Bullwinkle and Hammerhead, comic book precision and urgent graffiti meet Hindu mythology, H.P. Lovecraft, punk rock, abstract expressionism, death, violence and Wilson’s own childhood. The mural is a gorgeously baroque labyrinth of sharply drawn, undulating Gods wielding weapons and musical instruments among phrases such as “Die! Die!,” I am becoming death,” “liquid courage,” and “XXX.” Red and yellow acrylics burst forth from the images and spill down the wall. Wilson managed to create a mural that is both a beautiful dream and a psychotic nightmare drawn from the pieces of his life. For instance, Wilson admitted that the title of the piece comes from the nicknames his grandfather used to address Wilson and his cousin when they were children. Altogether, the mural exudes a sense of primal rebellion tempered by a transcendental awareness of the absurdity of rebellion itself in the face of time and its repetitive cycles.
Directly under Wilson’s mural in the ACA’a Coca-Cola Studio is the exhibition Now Streaming, showcasing the assemblages and hybrid performance sculptures of Patrick Segura. As with Wilson, Segura hit the ground running after his graduation from ULL last year with his first post-grad exhibition at the now-defunct Gallery at the Grant (He showed his work there with Thomas Deaton, another extremely promising recent graduate of ULL who is currently in the ACA exhibition “Lost and Found: Louisiana’s Landscape Revisited) and an inclusion in the contemporary sculpture exhibition Red-headed Stepchild at the Homespace Gallery in NOLA’s St. Claude Arts District. Segura specializes in sculptures that bridge the gap between the personal and the private, by conflating the subject of contemporary technology with craft, domesticity and the familial. Various, colorful yarns, fabrics, sequins, a velvet curtain, terrycloth towels, a boy scout uniform and even a bridal gown collide with keyboards, computer screens, sockets, wires and electrical cords in Segura’s beautifully challenging assemblages.
For Now Streaming, the artist has upped the ante in his work by incorporating live performance into three of his ever-evolving assemblages. For the past two Artwalk evenings, volunteers have crawled into three of Segura’s sculptures to take cell phone pictures of the audience appreciating the works (the pictures then were uploaded to the internet) or play the ubiquitous musical note that accompanies computer updates on a keyboard while being swallowed by a continuously updating Facebook page. The energy of the exhibition can make one giddy, and the feminine wiles of each piece lulls one into a realm of warm, motherly bliss. Yet, there is something ominous and sublime at play in the work as well. Allusions to the body are stripped of individual personality and subsumed by all the domestic digitalia. It is work that speaks of surveillance, capitulation, anonymity and virtual obliteration as well as how technology is shaping humanity in its image. It is as if the duplicitous CEO/oligarch/matriarch “Mom” from the television series Futurama decided to try her hand at sculpture. Segura’s vision comes on warm, but is ultimately chilling when one realizes the implications of the work.
Together, Wilson and Segura have played a huge part in making the past two months of exhibitions at the ACA profoundly exciting and rewarding. Unfortunately, their work won’t be up for much longer. Their works are coming down this week. If you haven’t seen their works in person, I would suggest taking a visit to the Acadiana Center for the Arts as soon as possible. Five to ten years from now, you’ll thank me for this advice when you’ll be able to say ” I knew them when they were fresh out of college!” These two, along with Thomas Deaton, are on the verge of great things. I promise!
C’est Une Valse: A Night at the Warehouse on Garfield
Amanda Holt Robichaux
Approaching the Horizon
acrylic on canvas triptych
Brett Chigoy
Fire and Brimstone
enamel, dye and goldleaf on hand-tooled leather
Camille Banuchi
Sunset Drive – Arrival
gilded media on panel
Christopher Labauve
Untitled
ink on panel
Gabrielle Savoy
Untitled
mixed media
Lucius Fontenot
C’est une Valse
digital photograph
Pilar Z. McCracken
Untitled
prints
Rocky Perkins
Countdown
oil and acrylic on canvas
On February 11, 2012, my wife Kirstie and I had quite the day. Mardi Gras fever had taken hold of Lafayette. My wife’s main priority was attending the local dog parade with our Shih Tzu, Gigi. I was dreading it, and once we were there, I regretted every minute of it. I’ve got absolutely nothing against dogs, but dog parades are pretty ridiculous. It’s been my experience that dogs generally detest clothing and costumes, yet we humans continue to anthropomorphize and exploit them for our amusement. I suppose it’s a small price for a species to pay in exchange for free room and board. Anyway, Gigi was freezing and miserable, even though she was sporting her pink skull-and-crossbones sweater (’cause she’s so punk rock – LMAO!). She kept on shivering and ducking between us to avoid being pelted by beads or attacked by other dogs. Mercifully, it ended rather quickly despite some logistical hiccups. Kirstie left for home with Gigi while I made my way to the Acadiana Center for the Arts.
I work at the ACA as a preparator, but this Artwalk day I was also representing as one of the artists in the exhibition Lost and Found: Louisiana’s Landscape Revisited. I showed up a little early to make sure that everything was running smoothly for the opening, which was to take place an hour after I arrived. Immediately, I was plunged into exhibition hell: one of the videos wasn’t working. A comedy of errors ensued involving frantic calls to the ACA’s curator who was out-of-town on business, another video artist who was too busy watching the Metropolitan Opera being broadcast in the Moncus Theatre, the receptionist and myself. Did I mention that technology generally gives me the hives? Fortunately, I managed to get the video running just in time for the opening.
Then a maelstrom of small talk, artspeak and cigarette breaks, punctuated by numerous warnings not to touch or walk on the art (for some reason the general public can’t get over its need to touch or manhandle art, which while inappropriate, is sort of a good thing in a weird way), overtook me. My wife arrived and had a conversation with a girl who was perplexed, if not slightly angered, by the art on display. She couldn’t comprehend why all this bizarre stuff was being lauded as “good art.” My wife asked her to point out the one piece that angered her the most. She pointed directly at my painting. When my wife told me this, I cheekily felt really pleased with my work. One mission accomplished … I guess!?! Leave it to this art critic to create the most inaccessible art on display!
After the opening, my wife and I went out for dinner Downtown. After that, we were stuck. We couldn’t return home because there was a parade between us and our front door. By that time, it was so cold, the last thing we wanted to do was attend another parade. We decided to cut through the neighborhood of Freetown and head to the other side of Lafayette for some coffee and pastry. It was on our way back that I remembered that the artists of the Warehouse on Garfield Street were holding a post-Artwalk exhibition.
When we arrived, the Warehouse was already buzzing and the activity there only increased as the night wore on. Yet, the experience of the venue, the art, the artists and the patrons was lightyears away from the Acadiana Center for the Arts. The Warehouse always feels intimate and comfortable. There’s a certain amount of ease that goes along with viewing work there. As I write this, I have to laugh about this amazing quality that the Warehouse has because while we were there, we witnessed a protracted relationship meltdown, a guy who shouldn’t have been hitting on my wife hit on wife, and every time I wanted to talk to one of the artists exhibiting, they were either MIA or involved in long conversations with others. I mention ALL of the above to illustrate a point made in one of my favorite pieces at the Warehouse: “C’est une Valse” by Lucius Fontenot.
The title of Fontenot’s conceptual/digital photograph translates to “It’s a Waltz.” Yeah, life is a waltz … a fast and fleeting waltz with many partners and a lot of ups and downs. Fontenot manages to capture this poetic concept with exceptional economy. His viewers are given a glimpse of the tops of trees with the statement itself hovering over them like a lonely cloud passing through the photograph’s blue sky. Writers kill for this kind of simplicity and eloquence when trying to convey something so complex and ironic, yet full of gravitas. With “C’est une Valse,” Fontenot proves that, with nothing more than a few clicks of a camera and a mouse, truly profound and nourishing art can be achieved. What is interesting is that Fontenot’s piece is not very far off visually from the work of famed Pop/Conceptual artist Ed Ruscha. Yet, the feel of Fontenot’s piece is qualitatively different. Whereas Ruscha’s work generally exudes a sense of Southern Californian, apocalyptic anxiety and self-reflexive cleverness, Fontenot’s piece seems light and at ease with the fleetingness of life. It’s got “joi de vivre” – a thoroughly French/Cajun concept which, in my opinion, is much needed at this juncture in our civilization.
The other highlight of the evening for me was viewing the work of Brett Chigoy, who has been spending the better part of the past year recalibrating his artistic practice and crafting intricate images with leather, dyes and gold leaf. Chigoy’s images have always been indebted to the technique of pastiche, whether of the Dada, Surrealist or Postmodern variety. Chigoy’s interest in combining disparate images into one work continues with his current oeuvre; however, his image choices and the nature of his new media reach back to more unified and Romantic ideals somewhere between 19th century paintings of the Wild West, late 19th and early 2Oth century photographs, Art Nouveau, Greek Antiquity and early American leather crafts. Due to this mix, Chigoy’s new body of work downplays irony in favor of a rooted investigation of history, myth and place that still reads as contemporary art. Fire and Brimstone is an excellent case in point. Chigoy renders a pair of musicians (probably based on photographs from the turn of the last century) before a lusty red harlequin’s pattern and surrounded by stylized flowers and foliage that evoke Corinthian columns, Art Nouveau decoration and the designs one may find on a Western-style leather belt. Plus, the fiery image and the title of the piece meld and hark back to enduring myths of musicians being associated with the darker aspects of life. The relief Chigoy achieves with the expertly tooled leather of the piece provides a sense of shared and unified space. Fire and Brimstone and the three other pieces Chigoy displayed make a strong case for a return to craft practices and a renewed dialogue with history in contemporary art.
Sculptor/painter Christopher Labauve offered some interesting work on Artwalk night. The most successful of which were his “broken” paintings, all of which were untitled. With these works, Labauve treats the black frames of these as visual “containers” for the ink paintings inside them.The frames seem broken in various way, “allowing” for the paintings they “contain” to “leak” out of the frames. All of the quotations above hint at somewhat of a weakness in these pieces: while clever, they only depict brokenness and leakage, rather than fully engaging in these processes. As such, they operate as mere jokes on the conventions of painting. In terms of painting fusing with sculpture and the concept of brokenness, I would urge Labauve and the reader to seek out the works of Angela de la Cruz who manages to engage these ideas fully by allowing her work to literally embody these concepts. Jim Lambie is yet another contemporary artist to which I would refer Labauve and the reader as he has been know to create works that employ actual leakage, rather than simple depictions of it. These recommendations aren’t meant as a critical attack on Labauve’s work as much as a gentle nudge of encouragement because the territory he’s exploring is extremely engaging and fertile.
The rest of the fare on display at the warehouse had its own merits. Camille Banuchi’s gilded paintings operated as dreamy fusions of religious iconcography and landscapes. Amanda Holt Robichaux’s “Approaching the Horizon” continued her experimentation between abstraction and depictions of the human form. Rocky Perkins provided somewhat of a Gerhard Richter moment in the exhibition, displaying a Photorealist painting of the World Trade Center beside an abstract painting. Gabrielle Savoy displayed a handful of delicate and surreal multi-media works that had the air of storybook illustrations, and Pilar Z. McCracken offered a vertical column of playful prints that seemed to mimic photobooth pics.
True to form, the artists of the Warehouse on Garfield were all over the “dance floor”, exploring their own idiosyncratic sensibilities. Moving from one artist’s space in the main hall to another required a constant shift in perspective, but it was worth it. In the end, I felt satisfied. In a couple of instances, I was left looking forward to the next waltz.
Reggie Michael Rodrigue
Makin’ Groceries: “Fresh Produce” at Staple Goods
by Reggie Michael Rodrigue
“Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.” – Jean Arp, artist
It is a fantastical peculiarity of language in New Orleans and other parts of South Louisiana that few outsiders understand. This peculiarity, one among many, is the phrase “makin’ groceries.” It derives from the French phrase “faire son marche’” or “to do one’s market shopping.” The verb “faire” can either be used to connote “to do” or “to make.” Thanks to the poetic imprecision of the French language and a typically bull-in-the-china-shop translation into English, we in South Louisiana now “make groceries” when we go shopping. It is as if we whip the goods we buy into being from thin air. When one thinks about it, the phrase is particularly artistic in nature.
This notion becomes evident in the grand scheme of a tightly curated exhibition currently running at Staple Goods Gallery in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. The name of the gallery derives from the history of the building in which it is housed. In its previous incarnation, the building was used as a corner grocery store. The gallery’s co-op members decided to pay tribute to this history through the name, as well as the gallery’s motto: “We believe that art is a staple of life, not a luxury.” Hence, Staple Goods’ members decided to mount an exhibition titled “Fresh Produce,” which highlights recent work from the collective for the gallery’s present run as a Prospect New Orleans 2 Biennial Satellite. Nary a fruit or vegetable is in sight within the gallery; however, it’s pretty evident that making thoughtful and articulate art is high on this collective’s list. Gallery members included in the present version of the exhibition are Thomasine Barlett and Minka Stoyanova, Aaron Collier, William DePauw, Daniel Kelly IV, Anne C. Nelson, and Cynthia Scott.
The mother and daughter team of Thomasine Bartlett and Minka Stoyanova offer a mid-sized photograph that documents a series of living tableaux the pair orchestrated for the exhibition “Hot Night” at the now-defunct KK Projects/Life is Art Foundation. The photograph is titled “Hot Mammas of KK Projects” after the tableaux they produced which were titled “Hot Mammas” in toto. According to the “Hot Night” press release, Bartlett and Stoyanova aimed to “recreate period ensembles depicting 6 Louisiana women whose lives predate Air Conditioning. Live model/performers sit, sweat, and remove clothing as they attempt to endure the late summer heat, a reflection of fashion’s unerring battle with environment.” I never saw the original tableaux myself, but Bartlett and Stoyanova’s photograph manages to quicken the pulse, even though it’s pretty tame by contemporary standards. It recalls Ernest J. Bellocq‘s feted photographs of New Orleans prostitutes in the notorious red light district of Storyville. Bellocq lovingly and lustfully photographed these women of the night around the turn of the last century. There’s also something of the titillation of Jean August Dominique Ingres’s 19th century harem paintings in Bartlett and Stoyanova’s photograph. However, the commentary that accompanies the photograph cuts through the “heat” to bring awareness of the constriction and brutality that women have endured through the ages in the name of fashion, especially in terms of undergarments such as corsets. Yet another thing that adds a layer of complication to the photograph is the fact that it depicts a happening at KK Projects. The name of the artistic enterprise lives in infamy now in New Orleans, as owner Kirsha Kaechele has abandoned her project space, which has fallen into disrepair since she left the city, to pursue other creative endeavors. They say that fashion is fickle; apparently, Kaechele is as well. As for Bartlett and Stoyanova’s photograph, the descriptives “complicated” and “loaded” don’t even begin to scratch the surface.
Speaking of complicated and loaded things, three paintings by artist Aaron Collier are on view in “Fresh Produce.” Collier is a bit of a bipolar artist. One minute he’s drawing highly refined, conceptual/representational drawings and the next minute he’s cramming gestural and geometric abstraction onto a single oil canvas (typically gesture wins). Either way, it’s a game with high stakes that involves an exploration of discreet moments set against the backdrop of eternity. When viewing Collier’s abstract work which is on display here, one becomes more aware of time and the individual moments that form the fabric of one’s life within it through the accretion of colorful gestures on his canvases. Whereas most abstraction has the feeling of holding together – of unifying to become one thing – Collier’s abstraction always seems to be on the verge of exploding into its constituent parts. It’s as if his canvases and the human perception of time are the only things holding them together. In this way, his paintings seem incidental, rather than summarizing likes the works of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950′s and 60′s. A painting such as “Let There Be Floyd” illustrates this well. Out of a morass of scumbled, individual gestures in gray, orange, green, brown, blue and black, the name Floyd emerges to the right of the canvas. Whether this is an homage to an actual person or the band Pink Floyd, I don’t know. What I do think I know is that Collier is painting an abstract portrait of Floyd: one that relies on sense memory and disparate recollections rather than the sum total of who Floyd is physically. Its as if Collier is quoting Shakespeare in paint: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Collier’s abstract work operates as painting turned into a dream – a collage of the discreet moments of his life, and, by extension, ours as well.
The quote above from Jean Arp, the 20th century Dadaist, is not only appropriate to this article for its general reference to produce and art. Specifically, there’s quite a bit of Arp in the work of Staple Goods’ William DePauw. Much like Arp, DePauw focuses on fragments and how they fit together to form a new vocabulary of expression – one that is quasi-abstract and intuitive, rather than explicit. Besides the occasional drawing or painting, DePauw is primarily a ceramicist and a sculptor. In the past, he has focused on creating singular objects that are palimpsests of fragments from nature, human culture and geometric form. With his current work at Staple Goods, DePauw has inverted his usual process. Here, groupings of separate sculptures work in unison. Each individual sculpture operates like a word within a poetic sentence or a phrase. Individually, each sculpture has meaning; yet, when they are combined, the meaning of each object shifts in order to serve the ultimate expression of each grouping. For instance, DePauw’s “Invasive Species” is a grouping of a simplified human skull, a crow and a handful of small terra cotta shapes. The title calls to mind such things as Burmese pythons and African killer bees; however, such things are no where in sight. What we are left to contemplate is possibly the idea that we are the invasive species? Is death, itself, the invasive species? Is our brain and the way we perceive and order the world, as evidenced by the presence of the abstract, terra cotta shapes, somehow the alien in the grand scheme of things? What’s great about DePauw’s groupings is that they force engagement and demand a personal relationship with the viewer in order to extract meaning from them.
Daniel Kelly IV presents a large-scale drawing/painting on paper titled “Becoming Series 10.” Kelly has an au currant obsession with reinvestigating modernist architecture and what it signifies to us in our time. In “Becoming Series 10,” Kelly overlays a carefully rendered modernist villa in yellow with two more schematic renderings. All the separate drawings display a vertical thrust, despite their horizontality, due to the presence of pylons which elevate them above their surroundings (which are left out of the work). Together they operate as one ghostly figure, and Kelly accentuates this with a series of red lines slashing vertically through the center of the work. It is as if he has painted the soul of modernism: a soul that is essentially austere, violent, and bent on hierarchical domination. It is also the seed from which our current world is built upon. Considering that there’s been much talk lately in philosophical circles about the new aesthetic of metamodernism – a blending of modernist and post-modernist principles, it’s important for us all to understand what modernism was and what is worth saving from the 20th century’s radicalism. In a very real sense, Kelly’s work explores this philosophical terrain.
Anne C Nelson is an artist concerned with the spaces we take for granted – the spaces whose only purpose is to exist between other spaces of action and determinacy. These are known as interstitial spaces, and the term can be applied to the spaces that exist between the walls of buildings or organs in animal bodies. It can also be applied to zones of time without any discernible progress. In many ways, contemporary abstraction was made for this sort of subject, and Nelson uses it to good effect. Her “3 Inch Architectural Drawing,” which is actually 36″ x 48″, has the feeling of an inconsequential and dilapidated space in a home. Individual passages that seem to mimic broken plaster, torn wallpaper, rotting wood, mildewed stucco and desecrated punched tin all come together on the canvas in the way of a collage to articulate neglected space. In “Everything That Rises Must,” Nelson abstractly paints the ineffable moment that exists between the rise of an object and its inevitable fall back to earth. This is a moment of infinite stillness and grace, yet it’s also rife with sadness and longing for the magical moment to continue. Every physicist out there can tell one that anything is possible in the universe of infinite possibility in which we live; however, the probability of ever seeing an object continue to float and never fall is infinitesimally slim to none. This zone in time, marked by the absence of progress either up or down, is one of Nelson’s interstices.
In both the showrooms of Staple Goods, patrons of “Fresh Produce” are treated to two views of some pretty unorthodox chandeliers, but there is no lighting involved in these objects – just political commentary by way of some uncanny found object assemblage. These are the works of Cynthia Scott, the unofficial “queen of upcycling” in New Orleans. Scott regularly works with found materials so as to address the political and environmental concerns we all face today at the turn of the century. Whereas the dadaists used found objects and assemblage to shock the public into an awareness of the surreal and absurd all around them, POP artists usurped everyday objects for their blunt coolness and ubiquity, and conceptual artists used everyday objects for the meaning and metaphors which lie underneath their surfaces, Scott uses found objects to comment on how many objects are out there to find in the endless tide of waste and detritus that we as a civilization discard into the environment. Scott connects these objects to the environment through some creative naming, substituting the name of the imperiled barrier islands at the eastern-most tip of Louisiana for the word chandelier. “Chandeleur (The Fighters)” is a multicolored chandelier made from plastic baskets, ties and tubes filled with a substance which looks black as crude. The sculptural object certainly looks festive. However, plastic is a byproduct of the oil industry, and this industry has done much to alter and devastate the environment in Louisiana from creating canals through sensitive marshlands that continue to introduce salt water into the mainland to the 2010 BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico which ruined the landscape and wildlife on the islands in question. The second chandelier, titled “Chandeleur (The Fishers),” is devoted to the fishermen of Louisiana. Scott created the piece from found wire objects that mimic the wire traps that fishermen use. The artist adorns her chandelier with little wire boats as well. The two chandeliers call to mind the schism that exists between the two distinct industries, one (the oil industry)bent on the absolute exploitation of the natural environment, and the other (the seafood industry) which is concerned more with sustaining the natural environment for years to come.
So, the members of Staple Goods Gallery are offering some serious food for thought with “Fresh Produce.” There may not be much in the way of quantity, yet everything in the exhibition exudes quality, which is more than anyone can say about a typical visit to the grocery store in the 21st century. As far as visual sustenance goes, the exhibition is more than satisfying.
Thomasine Bartlett and Minka Stoyanova
“Hot Mamas of KK Projects”
photograph
Detail of Thomasine Bartlett and Minka Stoyanova’s “Hot Mamas of KK Projects”
Aaron Collier
“Expecting the Unusual”
oil on cnvas
Aaron Collier
“Let There Be Floyd”
oil on cnvas
Aaron Collier
“The Certainty of Opposition”
oil on cnvas
William DePauw
“Invasive Species”
ceramics
William DePauw
“Objects at Rest”
ceramics
Daniel Kelly IV
“Becoming Series 10″
painting/drawing on paper
Anne C. Nelson
“3 Inch Architectural Drawing”
painting
Anne C. Nelson
“Everything That Rises Must”
painting
Cynthia Scott
“Chandeleur (The Fighters)”
salvaged plastics, string and oil-like fluid
Cynthia Scott
“Chandeleur (The Fishers)”
salvaged objects, string and handmade boats
“Fresh Produce” is on view at Staple Goods Gallery, 1340 St. Roch Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70117, until January 29, 2012.
