Though less collaged than his previous work, the eight paintings that made up James Barsness’s recent exhibition are still dense with obscure imagery and obsessive detail. Loaded with cryptic symbolism, they offer private narratives steeped in archetypal themes: birth, childhood and death, sex and violence.
One of the first pieces that catches visitors’ eyes is Srdjan Loncar’s “Living Room,” which uses Styrofoam, photographs and pins to reconstruct the most used space in the American home.
As you walk up the stairway to the upper floor of the Opelousas Museum of Art, you hear the sound of running water and chirping birds. Above that, you hear a woman singing a mournful song, her voice reflecting pain and longing.
One of the brightest of these young all-stars is Croatian-born Srdjan Loncar, 35, whose large, obsessively complicated photo-coated sculptures dominated the last New Orleans Triennial group show at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2005.
With tonnes of art representing the world’s great cities already in its halls and vaults, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now dealing with work from an ex-Montrealer.
The turn-of-the-century British occultist Aleister Crowley loved New Orleans, calling it “… the greatest city in America, with the best red light district this side of Cairo, a beacon of civilization surrounded by an intriguing wildness.”
Artifacts of a bygone era—barn doors, a spinning wheel, tin snips, playing cards, a revolver, a tin cup—are culled by Whitfield Lovell for his tableaux. All are worn smooth by the hands of individuals long dead, for whom these were means of diversion, labor, self-defense or sustenance. Lovell animates the lost narratives embedded in these personal effects with shadowy charcoal portraits based on anonymous studio photographs, some drawn directly on the artifacts, others on aged wood boards.
Annie Dillard wrote that “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. You need a room with no view so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
Nicole Charbonnet grew up playing hide-and-seek in the majestic, crumbling aboveground Lafayette cemetery in New Orleans. Today, she still lives in New Orleans, creating layered images on paper and canvas in which the present hides within the past like a child crouching between tombstones.
Tthe thing that distinguishes Polidori’s photos is the thing that is missing from them: people. Instead, the French-Canadian photographer, who once lived in New Orleans’s Gentilly neighborhood, illustrates the lives affected by Hurricane Katrina through the city’s abandoned buildings.