Focused on craft and dedicated to traditional methods, Gunning has sidestepped current art world fashions. But, in New Orleans, that’s just another sign that he belongs here, for the city’s distinct culture has rarely shifted to suit national tastes.
James Drake is interested in systems, the micro- and the macrocosmic. Having recently opened the show Drawing, Reading, and Counting at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (May 7 – June 18), the Texas-born, Santa Fe-based artist is still at work within a system he created for himself over four years ago; creating numbered drawings on nineteen by twenty-four inch paper every day.
Get a glimpse inside Dale Chihuly’s creative process in Chihuly Faxes. With 21 color photographs and 130 faxes handpicked from an archive of 7,500, this publication, featuring a foreword by renowned author Francine Prose, boasts an analysis of technology’s role in communicating bold ideas.
Chihuly On Fire encompasses four decades of his breathtaking work in an extensive, illustrated chronology with 177 illustrations, including 166 full-color plates and a comprehensive essay by art historian and acclaimed author, Henry Adams.
The expressive mode of painting taken by Wayne Gonzales in Forest, the large-scale achromatic acrylic on canvas painting now at Arthur Roger Gallery, parallels the movement of matter and the painter/viewer in his characteristic economic and gestural strokes. As in his paintings of crowds, his marks beg not only the kinesthetic response of the viewer, but also a response in actual spatial depth. As the marks lay flat on the surface, they invite close inspection of their abstractness and simplicity, and distanced observation to marvel at the phenomenon of their gestalt, melding into legible representation.
IMPLICIT IN RICHARD’S painting is a revived perception of the decorative function of art. His pictures declare the power of decoration to concentrate sensuous experience and, thus, to grip the viewer. With a system of rhythms and carefully sited disjunctions — and, of course, his piquant sense of color, Richard makes delight unavoidable.
Schorr reads Donegan’s act as “simulation of total abandon” in order to question “who owns women’s pleasure—whether it’s made by men, or by a woman’s own body.” In a 1997 interview, Donegan discussed her own intentions: “firstly, to make a video that used sex in a style antithetical to the MTV jump cut” by using duration and fulfillment to reclaim “female agency.”
At Arthur Roger, two artists — James Drake and Vernon Fisher — approach them with collages of imagery, delving into personal history to make non-linear, and at times autobiographical, narratives. In the video space at Arthur Roger, Lee Deigaard’s photographs show the viewer the unseen landscape – darkened by night and populated with feral creatures.All the artists tap into a subconscious automatism and surreal intent in some form or another, embracing their themes through play, form, and concept.
George Dureau, The Photographs is an album of the great photographic portraits made throughout the forty years of Dureau’s artistic career—a New Orleans romance between the photographer and his subjects.
