Reflections

Some exhibitions are flawless, from the selection of artists and works to the title, wall texts and setting. This summer, Facades at the Carroll Gallery is one of these. Curated by Amy Crum and Marjorie Rawle, the show features the works from four female artists sharing a common interest through their practice, to reveal the "fallacies within narratives of the past". The exhibition includes a site specific installation, sculptures, photographs and a video.

The main gallery is filled with Carlie Trosclair's site specific installation Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial, 2019. Born in New Orleans, the artist is based in St Louis since obtaining her MFA from Washington University. The latex mold of a porch located in the Tremé features all the details of the wood and iron work embellishing New Orleans homes. A place where families, neighbors, old and young gather to converse, gossip, argue, read, tell stories, share space and life, the porch represents the physical imprint of the community. In the gallery, its delicate translucent shed skin evokes memories, metamorphosis, a past and an uncertain future, overshadowed by gentrification, fences, parking lots and lives centered around television and computer screens. The visitor may leave with a shade of melancholy after a walk through the silent ghostly structure.

In contrast to Trosclair's architectural display, the half-dozen works from Ana Hernandez fit on one wall in the back gallery. The title of the series Deconstructing Facades and the Fallacies within Narratives of the Past, Present and Future inspired the show. Discarded books and artifacts from Southern houses become media to create sober compositions. Each of the assemblages includes a book cover which provides the title of Hernandez's piece. Slavery Time, 2016, is the first of the series and features a delicate metal decoration crowning the composition, and at the bottom, a small iron grid. It is next to Symbols and Society, 2017, surmounted by an inverted V like a roof and Borderline Studies, 2017, which includes a torn piece of chicken wire fence.  Among the subdued colors of cardboard and book covers, the cerulean blue of A History of the Old South, 2018, attracts the eye. The viewer can look for the symbolic meaning of the objects assembled in a piece, however, it seems that  the key to the works is the creative process itself. It involves two stages: a phase of deconstruction, tearing books apart, a violent but cathartic act, followed by reconstruction, a rebirth of the book in a new form, offering a visual experience. Each piece includes an area of scrupulously aligned nail coffins, usually painted in red. The reference to voodoo practices adds a magical connotation to the seemingly quiet compositions oozing anger and pain.

Sharing the gallery space, a display of seven black and white photographs from Allison Beondé who recently obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Tulane University, fill the remaining walls. At the hands of persons unknown features unkempt parks, decaying buildings and a restored historic house flying a shredded American flag. Beondé captures with her lens uninhabited places but rich in history, like Arthur Shore's house, and documents neglect, precursor of oblivion.

Bleed, 2018, the interactive video from Jenna DeBoisblanc is about the Mississippi River, its tributaries... and more. The setting allows the visitor to wander back and forth to activate the work and look at the red meanderings become pink and eventually disappear when coming closer to the screen. The wall text refers to "the role of the river as the region's lifeblood", and "to the legacy of the environmental and social bloodshed that has occurred along the Mississippi". Eventually surrounded by a bright white screen, one can venture to call Bleed an allegory of life and death.

Facades is a challenging exhibition to make us reflect on past, present and future.  

photographs by the author:

Carlie Trosclair "Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial", 2019

Ana Hernandez "Borderline Studies", 2017

Allison Beondé "Braced School Building, New Orleans, LA", 2018

Jenna DeBoisblanc "Bleed", 2018

Adventures at the Carroll Gallery

For the new year, the Carroll Gallery on the Uptown Tulane campus features one of its own, Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor at the University. Sharing his recent adventures in painting, he is presenting twenty-one of his most recent works. The three rooms of the gallery are filled with paintings, collages and decoys in a judicious display presented by the artist himself for the opening of Something There.
Doom exudes from the large primal landscapes lining up the gallery's main room. Composed while Collier was reading the Book of Job from the Old Testament, the desolate scenery, with earthy tones and blurry shapes, evoke a threatening world in which the undefined becomes the threat itself. Revisitation, created last Summer for the 10th anniversary of the Katrina disaster, includes a wood piece retrieved from a ravaged house with foam still attached to it, like a parasite. Collier's preferred prop for his paintings is an owl, the symbol of wisdom, but also of death. In A Certain Uncertainty, the quiet bird stands guard next to the painting, serene and menacing, adding an ambiguous feeling. The compositions have no focal point and are defined by blurry lines and dark colors. The superimposition of browns and grays creates an effect of depth and subtle "lightning" in some areas of the works, keeping the viewers wandering in the landscapes. The contrast is striking when walking in the two satellite galleries. The pieces of smaller sizes radiate energy, like a promise of happiness. The vibrant saturated colors invade the space, screaming at the viewer their message of hope. Even the three owls perched on a ledge take an harmless turn, disguised in candy colors. However, the artist's message stays focused on doom as we come back to the first room before exiting the exhibition.
In his presentation, Collier refers to Gerhard Richter, Zubarán, John Singer Sargent and describes the conception of his works as an adventure starting with the juxtaposition of photographs of scenes of disasters and minutely decorated interiors. From then on, the images blur, dissolve and reemerge on the canvas, leaving "colors and compositions flow and impose themselves". Chaos versus harmony, tragedy versus happiness, the painter translates his vision of life with colors, constantly shifting between extremes.
To quote the artist: " Paint is the perfect medium for picturing paradox: painting itself is an in-between act, a simultaneous doing and undoing."

photographs by the author

Finding Home

It takes a collection of memories and all kind of materials to rebuild "home". For the exhibition Expanded Media at the Carroll Gallery on the Uptown Tulane University campus the five selected artists include Anita Cooke, Mark Grote, Rontherin Ratliff, Nikki Rosato and Sadie Sheldon.
At first, the narrative piece from Sadie Sheldon overtakes the room with its huge brownish wave along the wall facing the entrance. In The Flood, 2013, a female figure steers a boat tossed by the storm. The materials used to build the work, tarp, heavy canvas and weathered metal, allude to an industrial world of shipyards.The resulting composition is a scene full of drama.
Close by, four recent "boxes" from Ratliff inspire various emotions but are all about loss and rebirth. Reconnecting with the past through found objects is the artist's specialty. With a variety of materials, from feathers to old telephones, playing with light reflections, he creates a faded world, desolate, abandoned, where life stays in suspense. The works of Mark Grote are displayed in one room, appropriately so. The brightly colored objects could take over the muted colors of fellow artists's works. The wall sculptures become fun toys, leaving the imagination run wild. Smaller but characteristic pieces of each artist are found in the next room and the visit proceeds with the "maps" from Rosato who transforms roads, interstates into the blood vessels of otherwise transparent silhouettes. Anita Cooke's pieces complete the show. Built with material like bicycle tire tubing, duct tape, felt, electrical parts, vinyl polyester ruffle yardage... they result in disciplined, minimalist compositions.
Looking back at the title of the exhibition, the materials used by the artists are so diverse that it becomes irrelevant to try to identify them. Transcending the media, each artist develops his/her own language, inspiring melancholy with Ratliff, humor with Grote, or drama with Sheldon. Refusing to abandon the debris left by the disaster, they built their practice around them, linking past and future, conceptualizing the objects and in the process giving them a new life.
With this show, the gallery has succeeded in making us aware of local artists with a well-balanced display of their works. Ten years ago, Katrina brought a lot of destruction but taught them a lesson that cannot be learned in art schools.

photographs by the author:

"Vulnerable Embrace", 2015, Rontherin Ratliff
"Not Your Mother's Apron #2", 2009, Anita Cooke
"The Flood", 2013, Sadie Sheldon

Virtual Reality

 Portraits, still lifes, landscapes become a virtual reality through manipulation of fine details, perspective, viewpoint, lighting, shadows. In her exhibition Hyper Real at the Caroll Gallery on the Tulane campus, Bonnie Maygarden goes one step further. She creates a new reality combining synthetic material and colors. Artificial oranges, greens are applied on the pleather or nylon which is crumpled and then laid flat like a canvas, a technique reminiscent of Hantaï's pliages. In a dreamier version, the fabricated landscapes are black, white and all shades of grey filled with anticipated drama in their quiet emptiness. Coined by Jean Baudrillard and defined as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality", the concept of hyperreality is met in Virtuous Reality, 2013, Stylus, 2013 or A.Void, 2013 and similar works. In the same venue, Maygarden gives a variation on an impossible green with Buffering, 2014,  next to a minimalist sculpture made of four planks, possibly an homage to McCracken. This reminds us that the exhibition is set up for her Master thesis and includes also two works derived from photographs and neon showing the whole spectrum of the artist's practice. Minimalism and hyperrealism are not known to stir emotions and to avoid a possible monotony of the perfectly staged show, Maygarden activates the space with a mirror unfolding on the floor, reflecting the surrounding space. Hyper Real assembles older and newer works but the unity of the message creates harmony and an atmosphere of quality, rigour and professionalism.
My only regret, the exhibition lasted only two weeks.

photographs by the author:

"De.Fragment 1", 2013, Enamel on nylon
View of the exhibition

Up and Downtown

Uptown, at the Carroll Gallery on the Tulane campus, Jennifer Odem transforms the symbol of comfortable, stable domestic life, a decorative accessory for objects, sculptures or curios into strange lively creatures. Crochet and lace become sculptures and in the process, the traditional heirlooms get a new look becoming tri-dimensional  organic figures haunting the gallery. The make-over involves plaster and the unmistakably feminine, soft media is shaped into a plasticky, shiny, indestructible material, a transformation from a domestic to an industrial world. The white or black colors give an ethereal, ghostly feeling to the mysterious characters possibly born in a fairy tale. Odem's paintings along the walls complete the show.

In the same venue, two adjacent rooms are filled with works from graduate students enrolled  in the painting program at the  Newcomb Art Department working in collaboration with students from the music composition program at the Lumière Université Lyon 2 in France. In 1922, Moholy-Nagy created the famous Telephone Paintings. The progress in technology allowed this project to be realized through the transmission of live videos. One of them shows Bonnie Maygarden whose recent exhibition at The Front was commented upon in a recent blog. Equipped with her protective mask, she folds plastic sheets, circles the canvas and sprays fluorescent paints on it. The musical background provides a tempo to the action painting, adding tension to the process. Music and visual arts have been sources of inspiration back and forth for artists. Time, distance, borders are no longer impediments to their collaboration.

Downtown, Coup d'Oeil, Art Consortium is hosting a special guest, Jessica Goldfinch. The artist treats a somber subject, children and war.  Her paper doll like pieces are not toys, they are miniature replicas of children's prosthesis. The collateral victims of wars inspire also the paintings. Reds, black, dark colors, create a dramatic background for the tiny prosthesis which become a symbol of the ongoing tragedy.





photographs by the author:

"Continental Riser", 2011-2013, Jennifer Odem
Video: Collaboration Lyon-Nouvelle-Orleans
Model #L-0004, 2013, Jessica Godfinch