Opening Reception: Saturday, March 2 from 6–8 pm
Location: 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Monday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
From Saturday, March 2nd through March 27th, the Arthur Roger Gallery will present “The Texture of Memory,” a body of paintings by Jacqueline Bishop, along with “Ghosts” and “Silhouette,” which are installations by the artist. The opening of the exhibit will be on Saturday, March 2nd from 6 to 8 pm.
Jacqueline Bishop, Silhouette. 2002, watercolor and mixed media.
For the last twenty years Jacqueline Bishop has focused on painting psychological and political elements regarding the natural world. She has traveled through the disappearing forests of the Americas in Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, the Brazilian Amazon, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Belize. Recently she also journeyed to Calcutta, India. Jacqueline Bishop is concerned with memory, the feminine and organic aesthetic, and the truth behind destruction of the forests and the extinction of species. She does not consider her work as political activism but uses metaphor in her paintings and installations to communicate the politicizing of nature, beauty, decay, life and death.
The paintings in “The Texture of Memory” series are done in brown, the color of memory – sepia, the color of mystery, shade, calm, the color of tea and dried blood. Brown is also the color of the River Amazon, the Ganges, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers as the artist has experienced them.
“Ghosts,” a remarkable ceiling installation, is a paper butterfly forest made from Brazilian newsprint dipped in bees wax from trees in the Amazon. On an empty path viewers walk through a forest floor covered with fragments of newsprint and natural objects. “Ghosts” was inspired by experiments by scientists in Brazil in the 1980’s while desperately trying to save some demarcated areas from forest destruction by ranchers and loggers. The attempt at saving some large square fragment areas did not work. The destruction surrounding the saved forest areas affected the ecological balance and began the extinction process for some species.
“Silhouette” is a wall installation comprised of 25 small watercolors made from the water in the Amazon River hung in a grid that is covered by a black veil of 182 birds and representing the beauty and mystery of hidden places in the world and within us.
Jacqueline Bishop completed a Master of Fine Arts at Tulane. She has exhibited widely in the United States and also in Brazil. Her interest in the Americas began when she lived in the Dominican Republic in 1975. In recent years Jacqueline Bishop has regularly traveled with ornithologists and scientists to the endangered jungles of South and Central America.