Beset by overbuilding, subsidence and erosion, the Louisiana coastline is disappearing at an alarming rate: a total of more than 900,000 acres has been lost since the 1930s, according to the Louisiana Coastal Area Final Study Report released in November 2004. It was a coincidence, but not a negligible one, that Allison Stewart’s show of new paintings was on view the same month.
The Interior of the “Object” of the home, the objects that furnish these homes, the objects that absent people once used: chairs, beds, glasses, guns, medicine bottles, tools, tubas and record players are in the foreground, while reserved, watchful figure seem to be inside the walls that envelop us as we enter someone’s long abandoned home.
Jacqueline Bishop, whose new exhibit “Trespass” is on display at Arthur Roger Gallery, considers herself an ecologist and an artist. For years her jewel-like hyper-detailed paintings have dealt with the plight of rain forest beasts and birds, she’s traveled to Brazil several times to witness the loss of habitat firsthand, she teaches an art and ecology class at Loyola University, and lectures at ecology conferences across the country and around the globe.
The current collection of super-scale hyper-hued works by renowned Lafayette artist Francis X. Pavy delivers the visual drama demanded by the wide-open sun-soaked interior of Arthur Roger Gallery Project in the Renaissance Arts Hotel.
In his efforts to recount the picturesque scenes and bodily sensations of Congo Square — an open space for slaves in antebellum New Orleans — author Henry Edward Durell (under the nom de plume Henry Didimus) invoked a flood of images in the preceding epigraph. Geometrical shapes meet human bodies in this descriptive whirl of music-making and dancing. The interminable, incessant sounds of drumming, singing, crying, shouting, and rhythmic pounding are conceived as a form of music that, on the face of it, has no end.
BEAUTIES AND BEASTS by D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit Weekly So you thought you knew Little Red Riding Hood? So did I, at least until I started thinking about it. Then I realized that all the old fairy tales had blended in my mind over time into a gumbo of little girls, wolves, princesses, frogs and…
ALLISON STEWART This New Orleans artist takes inspiration from the Louisiana wetlands for her graceful ecological works by Elizabeth Dewberry, SOUTHERN ACCENTS Allison Stewart’s transition from a biology major who wanted to create black-and-white drawings for medical textbooks to an expressionist painter whose watery dreamscapes are colorful, vibrant, and anything but sterile is not as…
So you thought you knew Little Red Riding Hood? So did I, at least until I started thinking about it. Then I realized that all the old fairy tales had blended in my mind over time into a gumbo of little girls, wolves, princesses, frogs and dwarves, trailing off into a weird frontier populated by Frankenstein, Godzilla, Dracula, Dick Nixon and SpongeBob.
So you thought you knew Little Red Riding Hood? So did I, at least until I started thinking about it. Then I realized that all the old fairy tales had blended in my mind over time into a gumbo of little girls, wolves, princesses, frogs and dwarves, trailing off into a weird frontier populated by Frankenstein, Godzilla, Dracula, Dick Nixon and SpongeBob.
“Innocent Act,” Stephen Paul Day’s new collection of strangely beautiful, small-scale sculpture at Arthur Roger Gallery was inspired by the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale. But not the softened, sanitized cartoon versions that most of us know best.