Homage to a Krewe by Simeon Hunter, New Orleans Art Review IN HER LATEST piece, Hommage to Ste. Anne, Ersy Schwartz delights, surprises and intrigues us, offering an open invitation to share her very particular vision of one of New Orleans’ most diverse and surprisingly little known Mardi Gras parades. We see an impossibly tall,…
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.
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.
Visions are tricky things. Timing is all-important, it seems. For instance, no one had visions in the 1950s; it just wasn’t done. But by the late 1960s, people were having visions all over the place.
I can’t really say that there’s a unifying theme,” says New Orleans-born sculptor Ersy about the works in her first exhibit in more than six years, now at the Arthur Roger Gallery.
She puts nature to work in her art by Roger Green, The Times-Picayune New Orleans artist Ersy uses such non-traditional materials as snake skins, tree bark and wasps’ nests in her relief sculptures. “I never pass up an opportunity,” she says, “to pick up something in nature that I can make into something else.” Ersy…