Exhibition Dates: October 1–December 17, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 1 from 6–9 pm, in conjunction with Art for Arts’ Sake
Gallery Location: 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Extinct in the Wild, a mixed media installation by Courtney Egan. The exhibition will be on view in the Arthur Roger Gallery gray gallery, located at 432 Julia Street, from October 1–December 17, 2022. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, October 1 from 6–9 pm in conjunction with Art for Arts’ Sake.
Extinct in the Wild is Courtney Egan’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. The installation features multiple distinct projection-based works that meld technology with nature. Egan creates time-lapse botanical still-life work by taking a series of photographs that are compiled into films and composited with physical elements. With this process, she can create “impossible arrangements.”
Over the last two years, while producing the body of work on view at the gallery, Egan has worked with local native plant groups to gain a deeper understanding of local plant life and ecologies. The recent focus on natural plants has changed how she observes the ecology around her and has brought the plants into focus. She states, “I work to see and experience the plant world as the equal cohort to the human world, instead of a backdrop to a human stage.”
Egan uses technology to help the viewer experience the natural world. She sees the growing frequency of human exposure to nature via screens and addresses the dichotomy. She uses electrically-powered, environmentally toxic tools and their implications underline a contradiction, of which the resulting artwork is a record: the same tools that allow us to more deeply sense the world, also cause ecosystem harm. Most media-based experiences of the world are enjoyable and illuminating, yet disturbing and ethically challenging at the same time. Recognizing the contradiction and looking for ways to create within this awareness occupy an evolving part of her practice
Courtney Egan holds a Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art. She has screened short films at many festivals, including the New Orleans Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, MadCat Women’s International Film Festival, Kasseler Dokumentarfilm & VideoFest, the Black Maria Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where in 2004 her film The Chaos Hags received the Isabella Liddell Award for women’s issues in film. She was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute and Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans. She is a founding member of the New Orleans-based visual arts collective Antenna. She has taught art and media in elementary, secondary, and college classrooms since 1991. Courtney is currently a Media Arts faculty member at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA).
For more information please contact the Arthur Roger Gallery at 504.522.1999 or visit our website at www.arthurrogergallery.com.
