Water covers 70 per cent of the surface of the planet and even when you can’t see it, it’s there – under your feet, as vapour in the air, buoying the 1.4-kilogram heft of your brain as it sloshes inside your skull. So when Torontonians Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky decided four years ago to make a feature-length documentary on something as immense and various as water, they knew they would be climbing a slippery slope. Or, as Baichwal put it in a recent interview, “testing how far can you take an idea, a multifaceted subject, and explore it without having it fall apart into complete generalities.”

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Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

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Taming and culling artistic inspiration can often be a difficult task, but multimedia artist Lesley Dill uses a calm, organic approach toward her work. “I think of (ideas) as almost like frogs — jump-up solutions,” explains Dill from her New York studio. “You’re thinking about what to do next, then up from inside your stomach jumps an idea or a material or a medium.” A collection of the results from those ideas will be on exhibition in Baton Rouge from Sept. 6 through Jan. 19 at the LSU Museum of Art. The exhibit, titled “I Gave My Whole Life to Words,” honors Dill’s lifelong love of the written word and her tactile physical representations of her own interpretations.

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Bruce Davenport’s meticulously plotted Bruce Jr. Does the Parades involves ten gloriously large diagrams of revelers and marching bands from an aerial perspective, and seven specifically hung 11×14 details of Mardi Gras. Each framed paper piece is a crisp 60×40 and they are hung in regimented order, like their subjects are arranged in marching band formation. Davenport worked in marker and pen, but the resulting work feels like a reliquary document instead of a teenage notebook. Davenport takes the viewer through the stories of black New Orleanians by narrating the scenes in ballpoint pen.

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Bruce Davenport Jr. has taken his passion for New Orleans high school and college marching bands and translated it into a multi-layered personal language. Stand 10 feet from one of Davenport’s drawings and you will be struck by the artists’ command of stark geometric composition. Stand five feet from his drawings and you will be fascinated by his amazingly complicated hieroglyphic interpretation of Crescent City parades. Lean in for a close look and you’ll be able to read his personal and political musings, delivered with rap swagger. The whole effect is fascinating.

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Friends of New Orleans artist George Dureau have organized a benefit auction to help defray costs of nursing and medical care for the 82-year-old French Quarter icon. Dureau, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, is confined to a nursing home. Dureau’s personal effects will go on the block at Crescent City Auction Gallery, 1330 St. Charles Ave. The July 13 auction begins at 1 p.m. and features both the studio props that appeared in Dureau’s acclaimed photographs, and a host of domestic objects. Highlights include a 19th century walnut bed; a pair of modernist chairs by Bertoia, and a cypress refectory table that Dureau, a grand entertainer, once used for dinner parties.

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When the Macondo well blew in April of 2010, killing 11 men and setting off the worst oil discharge in U.S. history, Jacqueline Bishop’s initial reaction was one of action. After all, the New Orleans-based visual artist has spent decades highlighting environmental issues in exotic locals like the Amazon. Yet here was a major man-made disaster in her own backyard. Bishop spent many weeks during the spill working at Grand Isle State Park cleaning oil from beach-hugging hermit crabs and reintroducing them to the water. It was something to do at a time when those in charge searched, seemingly in vain, for ways to stop the torrent of oil flowing from the Gulf floor.

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The shape of Relics, presenting new work by artist Troy Dugas, provides a fascinating, intriguing, and interesting experience for viewers familiar and new to the artist’s work. Those for whom the artist’s work is new will have the delightful experience of exploring their way through the intricately patterned iterations of these amazing tessellations for the first time. Those in the know, already familiar with the artist’s earlier work, will have the satisfaction of the insider witnessing the evolution of earlier themes into new variations of recursive patterns. Of interest to both will be the artist’s radical essays into the new subjects of portraits and still lives with their historical and representational references and new ways of working with materials. New expressions of the intricately patterned mandala idea focuses one’s attention away from peripheral distractions and into the minutiae of their making, into meditation on visual pattern and movement as the eye becomes involved in deciphering the complex interrelationships among patterns, rhythms, and repetitions.

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