Tagged: Stephanie Patton
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.
Oxford American: The Only Stair That Doesn’t Creak: The Southern Open 2012
My second article for Oxford American Magazine’s website just got published today! It’s on the intersection of Global Art, business, Regionalism and the Southern Open 2012 in Lafayette, LA. You can check it out here.
Stephanie Patton at The Front
This is a video of artist Stephanie Patton’s video installation “Dream” in her solo exhibition “General Hospital” at The Front in New Orleans. In the her video, Patton sings the standard “Dream a Little Dream of Me” while swathed in feathers before her wall sculpture “Dream Catcher.” The video is a funny and tender take on the afterlife, memory and dreams.
on view in Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital” at the Front, 4100 St. Claude Avenue • New Orleans, LA 70117 • Saturday & Sunday 12 to 5 pm until November 6, 2011
*** Author’s note: You can read my review of “General Hospital” here.
Stephanie Patton at The Front
Video of patrons viewing artist Stephanie Patton’s video “Heal” in her solo exhibition “General Hospital” at The Front in New Orleans. You can hear Patton off camera making quips about the video to the patrons. In the artist’s full video, she squeezes lemons and makes lemonade for nearly two hours. At the end of the video, she takes two lemon halves, stuffs them with cotton batting and sews them together to make them “whole” again. This video captures the lemon “surgery.”
on view in Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital” at the Front, 4100 St. Claude Avenue • New Orleans, LA 70117 • Saturday & Sunday 12 to 5 pm until November 6, 2011
*** Author’s note: You can read my review of “General Hospital” here.
Stephanie Patton at The Front
Stephanie Patton
“Friends Forever”
mattress quilting, high density foam, wood
2011
on view in Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital” at the Front, 4100 St. Claude Avenue • New Orleans, LA 70117 • Saturday & Sunday 12 to 5 pm until November 6, 2011
*** Author’s note: You can read my review of “General Hospital” here.
Stephanie Patton at The Front
Stephanie Patton
“Center Piece”
vinyl, batting, wood
2011
on view in Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital” at the Front, 4100 St. Claude Avenue • New Orleans, LA 70117 • Saturday & Sunday 12 to 5 pm until November 6, 2011
*** Author’s note: You can read my review of “General Hospital” here.
Stephanie Patton at The Front
Stephanie Patton
“Buffer”
mattress quilting, high density foam and wood
2011
on view in Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital” at the Front, 4100 St. Claude Avenue • New Orleans, LA 70117 • Saturday & Sunday 12 to 5 pm until November 6, 2011
*** Author’s note: You can read my review of “General Hospital” here.
Stephanie Patton’s “General Hospital” at The Front
Lafayette/New Orleans artist Stephanie Patton has crafted a restrained yet moving exhibition with “General Hospital.” It’s also funny, too! It is a visual meditation on the healing process, and shouldn’t be missed. For the closing weekend of the exhibition, Pelican Bomb asked me to review “General Hospital,” and this is the result!
Prospect New Orleans 2: Digging for Gold in the Crescent City (Part 2)
by Reggie Michael Rodrigue
Author’s note: Please see the earlier post “Prospect New Orleans 2: Digging for Gold in the Crescent City (Part 1)” on this site for the beginning of this story
Our visit to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art was complete, and the afternoon was turning into the evening. Time was not our friend at the moment. My wife and I made a b-line for Julia Street which is the main thoroughfare through the traditional Arts District in NOLA where most of the blue-chip galleries are. The promise of Arthur Roger Gallery, Gallery Bienvenu and the Heriard-Cimino Gallery dangled in front of my nose. I especially wanted to see what was inside Arthur Roger Gallery: An exhibition of photography and sculpture by famed film-provocateur John Waters and the multi-media art of rising New Orleans art star Dave Greber who has his roots in the St. Claude Arts District as a member of the Front Gallery. Alas, we got to Julia Street and every gallery was closed. All we could do is look through the windows and doors of the darkened and vacant spaces and sigh.
Throughout all of this, my wife was becoming increasingly hungrier and suffering from a headache. To be honest, I was dealing with one too, but I was medicating myself with regular doses of ibuprofen, regardless of whether I had food in my stomach or not. I’m stupid that way. In my jacked-up mode of thinking, art takes precedence over the well-being of my stomach lining. Anyway, I love my wife unconditionally, but she has a tendency to not take care of herself when the time is right, which would have been in the lull between arriving in NOLA and waiting for entrance into our hostel. We were in a dilemma. I figured the only easy way to obtain food for us was to sit down at a restaurant in the area we were in or somewhere in the French Quarter because the next destination was the St. Claude Arts District, and I’ve heard that it’s a notoriously difficult place to find a meal, especially since I was unfamiliar with the area. However, we also had to find a way to get down to the Prospect New Orleans 2 Visitors Center quick so that we could get onto a shuttle to St. Claude. For some reason, I felt that with every minute that passed, the chances of getting a map and a shuttle from the center seemed to dwindle.
We decided to hail a cab from Julia St. to Rampart and Esplanade. $10 later, we arrived only to find that the Prospect New Orleans Visitors Center had just closed ten minutes earlier. A couple from Houston was stranded there as well. They were talking to some guy who I thought was a volunteer. He was on the phone with somebody, telling them about our predicament. That’s when we learned that we could have boarded a shuttle from the W Hotel in the Arts District – the f*#king district we just left! Thanks CAC volunteers!!!
Just as I was about to blow a gasket, Stephanie Patton and Brian Guidry drive by and spot us. Both are artists who divide there time between NOLA and Lafayette. Both of them are also close friends to my wife and myself. They end up making the block and picking my wife and I up to whisk us to St. Claude. Patton and Guidry both had openings at their respective galleries on St. Claude that night. I felt really bad about leaving the Houston couple behind, but all of a sudden, time and space began to bend. We were in warp speed and couldn’t quibble about the misfortune of strangers.
We arrived at Stephanie Patton’s gallery, the Front, which is a co-op run by a handful of NOLA artists. Most of the galleries in the St. Claude Arts district operate in the same way with member artists taking on the duties of being the galerist and curator for the exhibitions as well as producing the art. On display in the gallery was Patton’s solo exhibition “General Hospital.” The exhibition is a poignant and funny visual exploration of the healing process which necessarily needs to take place after tragedy strikes. Inside the gallery, viewers are treated to some of the most well-crafted objects on display at P.2. Pills, a door, a pair of angel wings, a large curvilinear spiral and handmade lettering which spells out “Friends Forever” are hung exquisitely on the walls. Each object is made from either mattress covering or white, vinyl leather that has been upholstered. However, the centerpiece of the exhibition is Patton’s 1 hour and 50 minute long video of the artist squeezing lemons, making lemonade and then stuffing the used rinds with cotton batting and sewing them up so as to make them “whole” again. The whole video is based on the colloquialism “making lemons into lemonade” or turning tragedy into triumph, and it is riveting. As far as exhibitions go as a whole, “General Hospital” was the best/most well thought-out one I saw on my trip to P.2. The proof came in the fact that Patton had sold four pieces from the exhibition. Two now belonged to gallerist Arthur Roger and a well-respected collector from Los Angeles.
Also on view at the Front, was a strange group project from the co-op members that staked it’s claim on the back yard. They called it “The Crave”: a combination of the words cave and rave. It was a hastily built geodesic dome made of PVC pipe, visqueen, and god knows what else that housed an air conditioner, some really DIY sculpture that looked like refuse turned into a vase of flowers and a ring of stalagmites, and a watery video projection. Musical accompaniment was provided by a DJ right outside of it. The first thing that came to my mind was the phrase “underground disco oil spill.” I found out that this was the second version of “The Crave.” The Front members had actually built another one that had been destroyed by 40 mph winds the week before. The whole thing was ridiculous, but well appreciated.
Next up, we heard that a local BBQ entrepreneur had set up shop in front of the Good Children Gallery across the street. It was definitely time to eat! My wife and I made our way over there like white lightning. The food was looking good, but he didn’t have anything to drink, so while my wife waited on our BBQ, I made my way to a local convenience store to buy some water. I got a little bourbon while I was there, too! *** For future reference, if any of you ever want to impress this critic, giving me bourbon is a great place to start.*** So I returned to the sidewalk before the gallery just in time for the BBQ to be ready! My wife and I found a spot next door on a stoop to eat, and we tore into our food like rabid wolves! It was like BBQ from Heaven!
After our stoop BBQ, I noticed that there was something going on right beside us between the stoop and the gallery next door. Surprise! A pop-up gallery had just popped-up in the garage right by us while we were eating! It was the Rusty Pelican Gallery, owned and operated by the couple who owned the stoop we were just sitting on. I walked into the garage-come-gallery to find a wonderland of mechanical and light sculptures made from old rusty metal, incandescent lights, doll parts, and other assorted detritus. There were also some really good paintings and drawings inside. My wife and I were so impressed, we bought 2 really cool, metal scull, refrigerator magnets to remember the place.
Next, we entered the Good Children Gallery. It was a zoo inside! St. Claude had hit its stride by this point, and the place was filled with people. This made it really difficult to document the work there, but I managed for the most part. Each individual piece from the Good Children co-op members was good, but they could have stood to have more breathing room for the disparate works on display. The exhibition seemed cramped and disjointed. That’s the ever-present problem with group shows in small spaces. I’m sure the amount of people packed intot he place didn’t help either. But there were some pieces that stood out for me. Artist Lala Rancik takes top honors for her comic black and white, split-screen video of herself doing slapstick in an antique domestic setting. Srdjan Loncar provided a funny piece about a fictitious business which “fixes” broken things by covering them with photographs to make them look fixed. The artist duo Generic Art Solutions displayed two of their light boxes which incorporate somewhat holographic pictures of policemen in what I thought was riot gear. These images reminded me of the Ring Wraiths in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. They pack a punch and are unbelievably menacing, despite having a strip club marquee feel to them as well. Brian Guidry’s lone painting in the show was an abstract, hard-edged, precisionist master stroke as well, which separated it from the pack.
After our visit to Good Children, my wife and I took a trip with Brian Guidry and artist Emee Morgan to the Pearl, a home/speak easy that had been converted to an art venue as well. We arrived at the intersection that the Pearl is located on, and Brian said jokingly while pointing to various residences, “It’s not this mansion, or this one, or this one! It’s this place with all the junk and the weeds!” Indeed it was, Brian! Indeed it was! We walked up a set of old wooden stairs into an ante-chamber overflowing with art and junk. It was dark and it was hard to distinguish one from the other. Occasionally, I would find an exhibition card that announced that what I was looking at was art. Once, I got further into the Pearl, the things that stood out from the miasma of it all were the videos which were all over the place. It felt like the house/speak easy/gallery was somewhere between dead and alive. It was dreamy and unreal, yet so in-your-face! Most of the place was only lit by ambient light coming from colored lights and the video projections. The place seemed to be an endless maze of sights and sounds, some comforting some creepy, some downright gut-wrenching. It was everything I needed from the biennial but I didn’t know I needed. The work was crammed into this space, lost among all the domesticity and the junk, but it didn’t matter because it worked as a whole. You could even get a drink there and order some food from fully stocked kitchen! It was amazing! It said everything one needs to know about New Orleans in the 21st century, and I loved it! I was so impressed with it, that a took a video of the whole spectacle from the front door to the back yard, and I’ll be posting it soon! Some of the highlights for me were Coutney Egan’s film projection of flowers in bloom in the bath tub inside the bathroom, Brian Guidry’s edited video of an episode of “Wild Kingdom,” Dave Greber’s video of ridiculously happy cult members on the beach after the oil spill, Lee Deigaard’s peekaboo videos in the central hallway, a video of a white South African artist making himself vulnerable to the black South Africans who congregate around him on the streets of what I think is Johannesburg, Anastasia Pelias’ devilishly clever three channel video that turns the consoling words and rhythms of her favorite oyster shucker into a psychotic, post-oil spill rant and a weird little installation in the middle of the Pearl that involves some kind of monster sculpture behind a window – I think!?! No matter, in THIS cramped space, it all worked and became a seamless gesamtkunstwerk that is a triumph, and a credit to all involved. I left the pearl with my mind blown wide open, which is good because it made me ready for what happened next.
As we pulled up to St. Claude St on our way back to Good Children, we saw IT … and IT was like vision, a dream within a dream. The minute we saw IT, we stopped in the middle of the intersection, and abandoned our vehicle. IT was a black truck being pulled by a team of people down St. Claude Avenue, emerging out of the darkness into the surrounding light from the street lamps and neon signs. I’ve never seen anything like IT. This was artist William Pope.L’s “Blink.” As it moved by us, I could barely take a breath. Once the truck was past, I could see the slideshow of images that had been mounted to the back of the truck: a selection of images curated from images that had been sent to Pope.L from New Orleanians responding to the questions “What do you dream, when you dream of New Orleans?’ and “What do you see when you wake up?” It was incredibly moving, and I’ll never forget the experience.
Emee left us to return to a friend’s house to sleep. She was exhausted from a full half a week of assisting with interviews of art insiders for Joy Glidden’s PBS show “Art Index.” We promised each other we’d meet up for coffee the next morning.
After all was said and done … after all the openings … and all the spectacle … after all the art talk … after midnight, Brian Guidry, Stephanie Patton, my wife and I made our fumbling way down to the Lost Love Lounge for some excellent Vietnamese food and drinks (we got lost on the way there). Some of the Good Children and the Front artists met us there. We met the “Sex Ponies” while we were there. They were a group of Amazonian women wearing skin-tight vinyl, corsets, horse-bridles with long ponytails dangling off their rears and mohawk manes. They canoodled with the patrons. At one point, the chef got one of the buttons on his shirt caught in one of their tails. There was also this girl dressed in 1940′s garb doing jigs, “dropping it like it’s hot,” and pole dancing very poorly to the music on the jukebox. The funny thing was that the music was generally down tempo, if not depressing. One of the songs she was dancing to was Johnny Cash’s cover of the NIN classic “Hurt.” Only in New Orleans …
We left the Lost Love Lounge hung over from the whole day but at peace with what we accomplished. Brian and Stephanie returned us to our hostel, and we said goodnight. I turned the key to the lock on the front door of The St. Vincent Guest House. It didn’t work. Another guest was with us: the staff had neglected to give him a key to the front door. We felt a little defeated. Then, another guest who had been staying there longer walked up and helped us. “You have to pull the latch while you turn the key, ” he said. We walked in, said our “thank you’s” and retired to our room to dream dreams of Crescent City Gold in complete exhaustion and satisfaction.
Author’s Note: Stay tuned for Part 3: Coffee Talk, sunday in the T-LOT, Staple Goods, running out of steam in the Quarter and what it all meant. Plus in-depth reviews and pics and videos of all the P.2 Exhibitions I’ve seen so far!
