Remember when you were a kid and you used to lay on the carpet so that your eyes were even with your toy soldiers or dinosaurs or doll house. It changed your whole perspective — literally and figuratively. You were part of the scene, part of the action, and the big world around you didn’t count anymore. It’s a universally known form of little kid surrealism.
“I always feel that if you asked me what movie that is from that the work has failed,” says filmmaker John Waters about his new photography retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Language as an instrument of perfect paradox, a medium of both exposure and concealment, has been Lesley Dill’s subject for many years. This exhibition included work both more physically condensed and more ethereal than she has shown before.
Hommage to Ste. Anne is Ersy Schwartz’ parade of bronze and wood miniature figures and floats, some arranged en masse to evoke the Mardi Gras marching parade that serves as its namesake. Others, variants of those designs, are presented individually atop stark white pedestals in the rear chamber. The little floats, and the figures that ride atop or alongside them, are very much in the spirit of the actual parade, yet are far more fastidious than the event itself. They are, in fact, very Ersy, an artist whose deftly precise touch recalls artists ranging from Bosch to Beardsly.
As Louisiana”s leading fantasy-based realist painter, Douglas Bourgeois deserves both a broader audience and more probing analysis. In the wake of his first retrospective, “Baby-Boom Daydreams,” he is likely to get both.
As a filmmaker, John Waters could always see both the trash in glamour and the glamour in trash. His earlier, underground movies, starring the plus-size drag queen Divine (who died in 1988), are as exuberant in their devotion to the outré as they were, and in some ways still are, shocking.
John Scott has spent his life transforming metal and wood into visual stories about black culture in New Orleans.
But the artist’s biggest challenge may be his latest: turning the derelict Lincoln Beach into a premier recreation spot while preserving its rich history through art.
Provocative. Witty. Humorous. Pungent. What more can one say about the art of Willie Birch at the other Arthur Roger Gallery in the New Renaissance Hotel at the comer of Tchoupitoulas and Julia Streets?
When artist Al Souza mentions his recent “paintings,” he is not referring to works that he made using oils, acrylics or brushes. Instead, the medium he uses to make these works is glue, and his raw materials are jigsaw puzzles.
Wow! I was quietly surprised by what I saw when I walked through the door of the Arthur Roger Gallery Saturday morning! Like the way a modem automobile bumper contact with a wall and then proceeds, slowly absorbing the shock of the impact as the hydraulic cylinders compress before bringing the car to a gentle halt. The gentleness is misleading for physics informs us that the energy is evenly distributed and passed on, not just reduced. A room full of large flowers and plants hanging on the wall and standing on the floor – paintings, collages, reliefs, and freestanding forms – terrestrial descendants of the cosmic effect of gamma rays on man in the moon marigolds brought into being with the physical exuberance of Bates’ handling of materials as creative energy reproduces the vital energy of plants and flowers.