Together

   
 Following a quiet summer, Arthur Roger Gallery is awakening with a bang. Its latest show Art in the Time of Empathy features seventy artists represented by more than one hundred works of art including paintings, sculptures, photographs and site specific installations. 

    A playful series of shoe-mask from Maxx Sizeler leads to a spacious space lined up with paintings and photographs, leaving plenty of room to wander around the installation from Meg Turner Boardwalk Testing Site, a kiosk advertising cures for our current torments: virus, elections, economy. It is a new world when exhibitions are also appreciated for their social distancing friendliness. The rear of the gallery, bathed entirely in artificial light keeps the same airy feeling before reaching the "dark room" always filled with surprises, this time a cosmic installation from Randy Palumbo Antigenic Rift.

    Louisiana is depicted through quiet landscapes from Simon Gunning and dreamy abstract meanderings from Brian Guidry. Its rich local bestiary becomes alive in Jacqueline Bishop's fiery end of the world scenes and Jonathan Mayers's illustrations of folktales. One cannot avoid a pang when looking at Brassband on Frenchmen #4, 2020, from Keith Duncan. The lively, dizzying painting underscores the deafening silence of a city longing for better times. Artists invite us in their studios (David Halliday, Amer Kobaslija), share drawings of their pets (Lee Deigaard), focus on food (Richard Baker's cookbooks, Amy Weiskopf's still lifes) or paint deserted gardens (Jim Richard). COVID-19 is on everybody's mind and inspires Luis Cruz Azaceta's cartoonish rendition with its punchy acidic colors or the weaponized version of sculptor Gene Koss, complemented by masked portraits (Meg Turner, Frahn Koerner). Death ultimately is lurking with the taxidermized pietà from Enrique Gomez de Molina. During the pandemic, loneliness is rampant. Marginalization, also a source of solitude, is brought up in Keith Calhoun's photograph of prisoners, George Dureau and Leonard Galmon's portraits, with works from Dureau, John T. Scott, Robert Colescott faring well through time.

Overwhelmed at first by the abundance of works, I could recognize most of the artists, each represented by an iconic piece, sometimes a series. It would be boastful to claim that I knew all seventy of them, but when in doubt, a discreet QR code available on each side of the wall display gave access to the list of artists, name of work, description and price, on my phone. 

 Virus, race, economy, ecology,..., old, young, alive or dead, famous or not so well known, the gathering of so many artists with works covering such a wide array of themes in various styles could seem indiscriminate. A closer look reveals that each piece reflects the essence of the artist's practice, and the abundant display offers the occasion to gorge on art after months of frustration when the only way to look at paintings or sculptures (forget installations) was on a screen. It also bears witness to the artists' creativity during the mandatory solitude and fosters empathy, its ultimate goal. 

 

photographs by the author:

view of the exhibition 

Jim Richard "The Waiting Game", 2020

Premonitory?

 As the New Orleans Museum of Art was making preparations for Art in Bloom, a yearly Spring event, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery opened Art in Doom: A Springtime Group Exhibition. The slightly derisory title became premonitory overnight in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly after my visit, the gallery had to close to the public. The works can now be viewed on its Website and through its busy social media. The exhibition curated by Matthew Weldon Showman features paintings, sculptures and ceramics from five artists.

Assembling more than thirty pieces in the front gallery, the display is easy to navigate through a virtual path created by sculptures on pedestals. Paintings filled with bouquets of flowers and joyous scenes of revelries provide a springy flavor to the show ... until doom seeps in, starting with Tiffany Calvert's works born from seventeenth-century Dutch floral still lifes. They are made of inkjet prints of masterpieces revamped through the combination of several processes described as "gridding, fragmentation, image reversal, painting over" resulting in "digital glitches and scrambled transmission". The final compositions provide a new aesthetic experience enriched by their references to art history going back to the glorious days of figurative painting, abstraction, photography , digital art and appropriation. Are the islands of black color obliterating the pictures an allusion to the death of painting?

At the entrance, one of the sculptures of Beth Carter illustrates her practice which also includes charcoal drawings. Broken Carnival, 2017, is an equestrian statue traditionally dedicated to rulers or warriors, this time, the naked rider appears powerless, slumped on his three headed, six legged draped ride, in disarray, fallen hero led by a fantastic creature. Rag Donkey, 2015, another work strategically placed in the gallery, is the hybrid sculpture of a man with the head of a donkey overtaken by a small crowned humanoid standing on his shoulders. The same message of strength and weakness, power and helplessness, is found in the remaining four bronze sculptures and underscores the new status of manhood depicted through  a dreamy world of fairy tales with uncertain endings.
The third woman artist, Nora See, tackles current socio-political subjects in her latest works. Her depiction of a blacked-out fetus or a man in full suit curled in a uterus is blunt and unsettling. Her redesigned map of the United States speaks for itself.
Peter Olson combines photography and ceramic in his highly decorated vessels. The circles of images produce a lively dance of historical and mythological characters intermingled with decorative bands, and include plenty of skulls and skeletons like in a memento mori. No ashes are found in the urns but more images emerge, like an overflow of life.
Last but not least is William Woodward, a guardian of academic painting who composes rich narrative tableaux. His skills in incorporating several stories in one painting are most likely born from his interest in murals: "Murals are works of art that decorate walls and tell a story." So are his three pieces about the seven deadly sins displayed in the gallery.

The title Art in Doom is eerily prescient and provides a thread to the exhibition assembling five artists of diverse backgrounds who through different media express a common angst at the state of humankind. Their works provide an occasion to pause and reflect but let's not delve too deep in gloomy thoughts. Celebrations, mourning, New Orleans knows how to do this in style... it's all about life.

photographs by the author:

Tiffany Calvert "#316", 2018
Beth Carter "Broken Carnival", 2017
view of the exhibition 

Listen

Post-war New York City saw the birth of abstract expressionism led by a group of white male artists. Norman Lewis, the only artist of color among them, is now considered the forebearer of African American abstraction. From then on, abstract enriched the vocabulary of artists who had to overcome the indifference, sometimes worse, the rejection not only from the art world but also from their own communities. Two years ago the Ogden Museum of Southern Art premiered a memorable exhibition Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art. This time, the more intimate display assembles the works of sixteen African American artists, each represented by one piece from the museum's permanent collection. What Music is Within: Black Abstraction from the Permanent Collection complements a solo show Melvin Edwards: Crossroads set in the main gallery on the fifth floor.

Colors hit you when you enter the space. How can such a busy group show fit in the small gallery? A second look reveals the carefully laid out display which includes a large drawing from
Ron Bechet surrounded by wall sculptures from John T. Scott and Kevin Cole facing the entrance, and on the right side, three geometric abstract compositions in conversation with three expressionist paintings across the room. When turning around, the visitor encounters a stunning draped canvas from Sam Gilliam and next to it a smaller "box" in shades of pink constructed by Jeffrey Cook. Clifton Webb's Totem, N.D., completes the show introduced by a wall text, a painting from Horton Humble, the youngest artist, member of Level Art Collective and a sculpture from Martin Payton profiled on the window's light in the hall.

This is a short description of the exhibition which warrants an in-depth look for the occasion to discover less famous artists like Merton Simpson or Moses Hogan who was better known as a pianist, conductor and composer. One can get lost in Forest Party, 1993, from the former, a textured rendition without focal point or look for the spiritual meaning of Turning Wheels, 1984, from the latter. Of course, local artists with their deep-rooted ties to music are well represented. John T. Scott was known to create his work while "jazz thinking" in his studio. His three pieces from the Ritual Cutter  series (1978) hung on the wall evoke instruments of torture, pain, tears, a song filled with sadness, and also of hope with colors bright like the sun. Music is a family affair for Martin Payton, brother of the famed trumpet player Nicholas and his sculptures often bear the name of  musicians, on view here Dexter, 1998, for Dexter Gordon. When I look to Ron Bechet's (related to Sydney) works, I hear Spirituals. Jeffrey Cook was a dancer for a period of time. Sam Gilliam is a fan of  Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Eugene Martin thought about becoming a jazz musician like his father and it shows in his jazzy composition illustrating the correspondence between rhythm and lines, melody and colors. Both Gilliam and Martin were connected in some ways with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., Robert Reed spent most of his career further North as a teacher at Yale University School of Art and  Arlington Weathers migrated from Guyana. The exhibition stretches not only geographically but also in time, representing fifty years of African American abstract art and its various styles from expressionist to geometric and color field.

Music needs to be heard, visual art needs to be seen and the exhibition is a great occasion to look at pieces of the permanent collection in the context of music. William T. Williams states that he was often asked:"Why are you making abstraction? It's not African American art" and he would answer "Jazz is the most abstract of all music. Music is totally abstract. How can you not say there's a tradition of abstraction."

photographs by the author:

view of the exhibition: 
Robert Reed "San Romano, Monticello, Brick II", 1982
John Barnes "Doe Poppin' II", 2015
Clifton Webb "Totem", N.D.

Eugene Martin "Geometric Abstract", 1999

Sam Gilliam "Drape Work", 1970

In Search of Beauty

The title of the exhibition Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires gives the key to Thomas's latest show  at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. For the art lovers who visited Mickalene Thomas: Waiting on a Prime-Time Star at the Newcomb Art Museum two years ago, it feels like an update with the display of more recent works. First time viewers can appreciate the whole gamut of the artist's practice including her paintings, photographs, videos, films and iconic "tableaux".

Located on the building's first floor, the exhibition starts with a large painting facing the visitor at the entrance. Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010, features three black women and the shadow of a sculpture from Matisse in the background in place of Manet's four subjects. Inspired by a photograph shot in the sculpture garden at MoMA, the work underwent several stages: cutting, collaging, painting with acrylic, oil, enamel, adding rhinestones (reference to pointillism according to the artist) to reach the final composition. Already displayed in a number of venues, it has brought in mainly positive reviews and the imposing figures succeed in making the visitor blink under their bold stare.

Following this masterpiece, Me as Muse, 2016, provides a very intimate encounter with the artist through a twelve-monitor video installation featuring images of her naked body intermingled with those of Western paintings depicting bare females, Saartjie Baartman (the Ottentot Venus) and brightly colored African textiles. Unabashed, the artist rejuvenates the myth of the nude and the canons of beauty.

The front of the gallery is occupied by a living-room, an invitation to curl up on a sofa and read a book from the selection of volumes piled up on the floor: Toni Morrison,  Zadie Smith, Maya Angelou, ... Houseplants, comfortable furniture decorated with African prints, books, carpets, rugs, fill the replicas of the artist's childhood interiors. In her interview for Artnet Thomas sheds some light on her "tableaux". She describes how she recreates familiar spaces from her memories: "we construct our spaces in various ways to express ourselves". The domestic installations provide a way to connect with the artist and her history.

The next works are hung along the walls leading to the back of the gallery. The mirror-based series are portraits inspired by the book and movie The Color Purple, and strong characters like Diahann Carroll or Naomi Sims. Most of Thomas's creations start with photographs  undergoing several processes, this time the last one involves silkscreening onto a mirror. The dreamy subjects appear remote and subdued, without a smile or eye contact, filled with the blues.
This is in contrast with Do I Look Like a Lady? a raucous video installation projected on multiple screens lining up two walls around a second living room. The You-tube clips of famous singers or comedians are selected according to their relevance to the plight of black females. The quarter of an hour projection is best viewed sitting on one of the comfortable armchairs.

In the next room, the smaller space allows the display of four works, two "picassian" paintings- collages  facing each other and two black and white Polaroid portraits of queer models (according to the wall text) engaging the camera with a proud stare, Courbet #2 and Courbet #4. The show ends with one of Thomas's black and white film shown in a dark backroom. Twenty minutes long,  je t'aime, 2014, shows close-ups of the artist and her partner on two adjacent screens. The camera is moving slowly over bare skins and it feels like intruding when confronted with the gaze of the two lovers enjoying their intimacy. In the background the sound of water dripping gives a measure of time.

The 49-year-old artist has been recognized by the art world for more than a decade and pundits have discussed, analyzed, dissected her work already. Inspired by a long list of artists, she has absorbed the essence of their practice to grow her own, characterized by multiple references to art history in her signature portraits of black women made in various media, from photography to collages, paintings, videos and movies. Ultimately her quest is powered by her own history starting with her childhood's memories, growing up as a black queer woman. Her art can be considered provocative and inciting voyeurism, but skin, breasts and pubic hair aside, her portraits are about the inner strength of her subjects conveyed through their intense gaze. The relatively modest show with about a dozen well selected works enriched by informative wall texts allows to sample Thomas's practice, interact with her homey interiors and follow the artist in her quest for new canons of beauty.

photographs by the author:

"Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires", 2010
"Sister: Shug Avery Breakfast", 2016
"Portrait of Aaliyah", 2017

Hell and Paradise

Buildings and their contents, an endless source of inspiration for artists, provide the theme for the works of three painters displayed in the Arts District New Orleans this month. Jim Richard, James Kennedy and Pierre Bergian respectively at Arthur Roger Gallery, Callan Contemporary and Octavia Art Gallery are expressing their creativity through their different style, from abstract to figurative.

All the Way Home assembles twenty six recent paintings for Jim Richard's tenth exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery. Among them, three of his iconic claustrophobic interiors of plush houses filled with furniture and objects reflecting the social status of their owners. Eight works feature empty gardens seen through colored filters, generating a moody atmosphere: fresh and peaceful greens, sepia memories, violet sadness like in Letting Go, 2019, ... and more hues. In contrast, bushes and flowers explode in the vibrant motley compositions from 2018. Three depictions of the artist's studio made in 2013 underline the difference between oil on paper the medium he favored then, and matte flashé paint, his most recent choice.

James Kennedy returns at Callan Contemporary with Notations, a collection of recent works veering further into geometric abstract compared to his previous shows. His architectural compositions have matured into tighter arrangements incorporating repetitive shapes of darker colors suspended on busy neutral backgrounds, like notes on a staff, adding multiple focal points and rhythm. Inspired by Goethe's writings, the multi-talented Irish artist creates meditative compositions evoking music, the most abstract of the Arts.

At Octavia Art Gallery, Pierre Bergian fills the space with his paintings of neoclassical buildings. Facades, architectural decorations, objects (ladders, chairs, tables) are drawn like preparatory sketches enhanced by delicately applied oil paint of soft grays,blues, yellows, ..., thin like watercolors. The empty spaces are an invitation to dream of walking through the doors, sometimes open, half-open or even closed, to take a stroll along the succession of rooms and discover mysterious places filled with the ghosts of history.


According to Plato's theory of art, the representation of a chair cannot be sat on, therefore art is not useful. This is a cartoonish interpretation of his argument but why paint a chair? or everyday objects? For Richard, they represent a presence (or absence) and a story, which can be hellish like in Modern Inferno, 2019, featuring a decor fit for Huis Clos, (No Exit), the famous play from Jean-Paul Sartre.
In contrast, Bergian's palatial suites bathing in ethereal colors evoke a paradisaical world. Matisse painted subjects in their interiors with windows opening on familiar landscapes, Van Gogh, his bedroom or his preferred bar. Here, empty buildings, houses, gardens, stay anonymous even when the title provides a clue, and represent a collective dream or nightmare, while Kennedy opted for complete abstraction to generate a state of meditation.
At the end of his visit, the patient viewer will realize he/she is not looking at but is looking in the paintings.



photographs by the author:

Jim Richard "Look in Here", 2019
James Kennedy "Notation IV", 2019
Pierre Bergian "Ruins", 2019

Pic of the Day

PhotoNOLA, "an annual festival of photography in New Orleans" now in its fourteenth edition, is the occasion to binge on photographs at diverse venues during the month of December. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of images, I cannot remember why I selected this photograph for my daily Instagram post. More I look at Go Back, Go Back 217 from Bradley Dever Treadaway, more I find it mundane and riveting.
The banal shot depicts a mother waist-deep in water, enjoying an afternoon at the pool with her two pre-teen sons. The trio soaking in the sun, looking up at the camera and smiling, represents the picture-perfect scene of a blissful Sunday in suburbia. The photograph is divided by a diagonal line caused by a sharp drop of the pool floor and on the left side, a greenish dark color replaces the background's cobalt blue surrounding the young family. Deep at the bottom of the pool a coiled hose is lurking.
The snake-like object creates tension and the picture becomes a story: Could the children fall into the pool's abyss? Could the inert shape become alive and strike them? Could a fun afternoon end up in tragedy?
Like a collage, the superposition of a childhood's photograph on a recent shot of the same pool blends past and present, contrasting a carefree joyful time with today's neglect, decay and emptiness. Where are the protagonists? What happened? Like a bad omen, a black frame surrounds the composition.
Go Back, Go Back is a vast project described by the artist on his Website as "exploring spatial, historical and technological ambiguity that concerns the recollection, reconstruction and failure of memory, manifesting as memento mori and the closing chapter of 50 years of family history."
The joyful moment next to the scene of abandonment hints at before and after, loss and death.

Bradly Dever Treadaway "Go Back, Go Back 217", 2019

Timeless

Photographs, paintings, videos, installations, the forty four works from twenty three artists selected by the guest juror David Breslin, Director of Curatorial Initiatives at the Whitney Museum of American Art are not only made of different media, they also represent a whole gamut of styles. At the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the highly anticipated opening of the yearly juried exhibition Louisiana Contemporary on White Linen Night is the occasion to discover new artists and works, and sometimes look at previously seen pieces in a new context like Sistema, 2018, from Kristin Meyers.
Near the entrance, the full-length humanoid of sizable height, wrapped in black material and red strips of cloth, is a free-standing sculpture with multiple points of view and focal points. Top-heavy, with a base anchored on a small golden pedestal, it defies the laws of gravity. The rigid torso supports two arms, each telling a different story. The left limb gracefully ends with a slender hand fit for a ballet dancer as the right with a gloved hand is ready to deliver a punch like a boxer. Above, the head is tilted upward, its face hidden by a heavy protective mask. The assemblage of sundry objects embedded in the fabric is an invitation to spend some time to look at the numerous perspectives. Shotgun, stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, a small black panther, diverse metal pieces, pommel of a sword or a knife, scalped bunches of hairs, sometimes hardly recognizable amulets, become part of the mummy-like shape. Weapons and trophies evoke a warrior. Like Janus, the androgynous creature has two faces, a small head can be spotted hanging from the upper back, tilted downward. The fixed piece is not static. Asymmetry and instability provide movement and energy. Dancing or fighting, there is action.
Going back to the title, "Sistema" or system in Italian is derived from Latin and earlier, Greek. The composition is an amalgam of cultural references crossing continents and centuries and adopts a universal language to "explore the human condition" (artist's quote).

photograph by the author

Along the River

White Linen Night is over. Time to go back to the galleries and look at art!
At the Contemporary Arts Center, Constructing the Break, an Open Call exhibition curated by Allison M. Glenn, is dedicated to the Mississippi River. It assembles the works from thirty artists sharing close or loose links to New Orleans. Their diverse backgrounds and practices enrich the multi-media exhibition located in the main gallery on the building's first floor.

The show starts with Tar, 2018, a Gothic tale of destruction by Joris Lindhout. The installation is made of two videos, a stack of newspapers laid on the floor tied with a black string, an iPad held by two black hands on the wall and an old tape player on a stand. The devices are connected through black wires hanging from the ceiling. The story unfolds on the bigger screen where a glob of oil drips, drops, becomes a creepy substance invading its surroundings and eventually the world. A prescient performance by Joseph Beuys recorded in 1974 in the Gulf of Mexico is displayed on a smaller screen. It shows the artist coating himself with the black goo in the middle of a green bog. On the iPad's screen, a humorous scoop about the FBI looking for a MoMA's curator taken away by a mysterious kidnapper leaving black prints, is accompanied by advertisements for backyard fracking. The introduction gives the vibe to the rest of the exhibition which features an abstract representation of the goddess of fresh water, Oshun by Anastasia Pelias, and three wall pieces from Julie Morel about loss and memory through maps drawn with technologies involving GPS, LED's and conductive ink. Undertow, 2015-2018, the site specific post-industrial installation from Elliott Stockes is made of parts from oil distillation equipment laid on the gallery's vast open floor. Displacement, 2018, an interactive piece from Nurhan Gokturk features two newspaper vending machines side by side in which mirrors reflect deconstructed images of ourselves and our environment. Gabrielle Garcia Steib's mixed-media installation involves sound and photographs to tackle a hot issue, immigration, while Ana Hernandez gets us back to the subject of fracking with two pieces of her series Altering Internal Landscapes: In pursuit of unearthing bodies of Energy. "Visual representation of ecological trauma", The Haynesville, 2017, and The Bakken, 2017, combine Netters Anatomical Flash Cards with a depiction of the formations pierced by nails, evoking pain, thus life. The wounded rocks next to the description of human flesh become living matter by analogy. Annah Chalew makes her own canvasses with trash and plants resulting in unique brown monochrome landscapes. Her wall piece Root Shock II, 2018, combines opposite qualities: primal, sophisticated, coarse, delicate, heavy, light, tough, fragile, ..., and benefits from a close-up view. The life-size photograph of a tree with hanging moss, glowing in the last ray of sun against a soft pinkish sky, perfect picture for My Beautiful South, 2018, from Cynthia Scott, is spoiled by a metal pipe protruding from the tree trunk. Its orifice is covered by a small round screen on which a video is projected. It was shot by the artist along the river's bank and documents the green pastures giving way to industrial complexes and pollution. In Daybew, 2018, Mississippi Swan, a virtual artist born from the collaboration between Rick Snow, (Mississippi River in New Orleans) and Chris Tonkin, (Swan River in Perth), mixes the sounds of two far away cities to obtain scores of electronic music accompanied by colorful graphics flashing like advertisements.
The piece is a great transition to what feels like the second part of the exhibition, dominated by photographs and videos. Twenty black and white or color photographs from eight  local photographers gathered on a wall convey their vision of the city and its people.
 Across, the sixteen-minute video featuring the sculptor Maren Hassinger and her daughter, is a performance piece born from the interaction between artist, landscape, wind, water, and a white scarf. The poetic images are followed by Thy Glad Beams, 2016, from Wiley Aker, a mixture of footage from news and archives in black and white accompanied by an ominous background music resulting in a dramatic end of the world atmosphere. Preceded by three minimalist sculptures made with  concrete from Jack Niven, the conclusion of the show is an epic tale of the Mississippi river, told in less than ten minutes. With its dense content, There's Something in the Water: Yemoja and Osun, 2018, the video from Tia-Simone Gardner deserves to be watched several times to get the full grasp of its historical, geographical, sociological, architectural, poetical references. 
Each of the thirty artists gets to shine in the well-paced display. The coherence of the selected works, their quality and relevance to the subject, make the whole exhibition flow from start to end without a glitch. Lately, viewers have seen a lot of political art. This time, the artists made their point through a whole gamut of expressions more powerful and inspirational than slogans .
They all communicate their unconditional love for the city, the river and the South, and along with it, the "concept of being rooted consistently tempered by infrastructural fragility".

photographs by the author:

Cynthia Scott "My Beautiful South", 2018
Ana Hernandez "The Haynesville" and "The Bakken", 2017
View of Tia-Simone Gardner's installation "There's Something in the Water: Yemoja and Osun" 

The Art of Coding

Two small exhibitions are triggering deep cogitations about the relationship between art and technology. At first sight, they do not appear to have a connection, one features abstract landscapes, the other figurative pieces, but they both involve computers. B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G from James Hoff and Digital Pictorialism: An Exhibition of Images Produced With Code from James L Dean are located in different areas of the city, the former at the Contemporary Arts Center in the New Orleans Art District and the latter at Staple Goods, a collective art gallery in the Saint-Claude Arts District.
James Hoff's works fill one room on the second floor of the Contemporary Art Center in a traditional display of "paintings" lined up along the four walls. An odd addition is brought up by holes in the walls exposing wooden structures from the building itself. A closer look at the abstract works is a surprise due to the texture of the "canvas" and the consistency of the "paint". The eight numbered Skywiper are chromaluxe transfers on aluminum. David Everitt Howe wrote a detailed critique about the resulting pieces in Art Review . The title of the works are worth an explanation. Skywiper is the name of the virus which after infecting a program produces the abstract landscapes. A wall text at the entrance provides a description of the process involved: "Hoff distills the visual file to code, unearthing a subtext, underlying every image, as well as competing visual field, a linear mapping of signs and alternating color. He then infects that field with contemporary malware, in this case the Skywiper virus". More information is available about the virus and its previous use (politics are involved). The artist who relates to William Burroughs's ideas has previously experimented with viruses in music and now applies the technique to visual art and also architecture. The holes in the wall are designed according to a jpeg picture of the room infected by the virus. Contrasting with the Brooklyn's artist threatening world of viruses, uncontrolled replication, disease, corruption and ultimately destruction, Dean's works bathe in a peaceful atmosphere, filled with bunches of flowers, still lifes or calm interiors reminiscent of seventeenth Century Dutch paintings including a classic memento mori. This time, in the realm of photography, the creation of a program is the key to the production of the art. The process involves several stages described with minutia at the start of the exhibition. A very informative text written by Minka Stoyanova Reading Digital Pictorialism completes the display.
To appreciate the two exhibitions takes some background in computer technology. Did you know that bricking, the title of Hoff's exhibition, refers to "the overload of an operating system when infected with malware, which renders it useless, at least for its originally intended purposes." Nevertheless, the two artists's use of the technology as a new medium to produce visual art is futuristic and inescapable. Abstract or figurative, through the manipulation of images, art is becoming deeply involved with the world of computers and the artist may not need assistants to mix paint or prepare a canvas anymore, but will need coders, developers, engineers...

At the end, can the list of processes used to produce the art be replicated? We all heard: "My child could draw like that" Are we going to hear "My child can code like this". If you are computer savvy, it seems that you can become an artist. The use of the technology is here to stay, the resulting piece of art ultimately will define who is an artist.

photographs by the author

James Hoff "Skywiper No.52" and "Skywiper No.83", 2015
                   "Skywiper No.33", 2015
James L Dean "Haydel-Jones Plantation House in Edgard, LA"
                       "Broad Stroke Chrysanthemums"

B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G till February 28 at the CAC
"Digital Pictorialism: An Exhibition of Images Produced With Code" just closed this week

Julia Street

This week-end was busy in New Orleans for the art lovers. Friday night was the opening of a new exhibition at the Garden District Gallery, titled "Treasures of the Gulf". Among the 18 artists represented, Bill Myers from Ocean Springs did retain my attention with his sculptures. Interesting compositions, well seated (on a pile of fake books usually), they are built of strong materials, but they appear fragile and bring a flavor of nostalgia. Each tells a story.

The same evening, I visited the studio of the sculptor-music composer Christian Van Campen...one week early, his open house is next week.

Yesterday was the first Saturday of the month and the art galleries were opened late for their new exhibitions. At the Arthur Roger Gallery, one room was filled with art from local artists related to disasters...again. The work from Dawn Dedeaux "Broken" 2006-2007, sounds of laments coming out of a wide broken pipe is so timely.

Another work, from Jacqueline Bishop , titled "Tresspass"2003-2004 is premonitory.

The show "Field Recordings" was lighter at the Heriard-Cimino Gallery. In a dark room, the videos from Courtney Egan went through the lifecycle of a flower with "Repercussion", or made the Spanish Moss float on the wall. All these videos require precise synchronisation of the cameras and sometimes sounds.

The action was also in the street, a Jazz funeral for the dead pelicans went by. At the end of the parade, they left behind an installation?...street art?

photographs by the author

Cuba and the art galleries

Works from Angel Delgado are displayed at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in the Art District on Julia Street in New Orleans.

The artist brings us in the world of prisons and makes us feel close to its inhabitants. Used handkerchiefs or bedsheets become the canvas on which he prints digital photographs. On this background, the artist draws a silhouette in pencil wax and adds another dimension to the piece. These digital prints of chains, locks, watchtowers are all related to the prisoners universe.
As we look closer, each photograph tells a heartwrenching story.
The items used for the canvas, with very personal stains make me think of the Saints relics in churches, whiffs of smells reach me.
Is the silhouette the lonely prisoner? Is it the viewer?...Hard to know.

Delgado spent six months in jail after defecating on a copy of Granma, the communist paper. This is where he started using these very personal items. He also sculpted bar soaps. Whatever material he is using, the message stays focused on the prisons.

The experience of the artist, who is close to the subject, helps the viewer become a participant. It is hard not to get touched. The artist gives us a glimpse of the carceral universe, but the stains are not blood, they are nicotine , lipstick, and the photographs are colored, bright background for the silhouette.

photograph from the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery's website