Press & Media

“Last Call: Stephen Paul Day at Arthur Roger Gallery,” Pelican Bomb

Self-loving, self-reflexive, or perhaps self-deprecating, Stephen Paul Day’s “Blame It On Vegas: Collecting Meta-Modern” offers many opportunities for similarly complicated readings. As both curator and artist, Day forms the exhibition’s thesis by creating and gathering an odd variety of objects from historically and geographically distant places. These objects share a palette of white, bronze, and pastels but the harmony ends there. Wavering between humor and novelty, with a hint of disgust, the viewer is taxed with making sense of Day’s assemblage of the “metamodern.”

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“‘Optical jazz’ – Artist John T. Scott’s work on display at LASM,” The Advocate

His mother told him to pass it on. And he did. He passed it on to his students who became teachers, and they passed it on to their students. He passed it on to other artists, who passed it on to their colleagues. And they’ve gathered in the Louisiana Art & Science Museum on this particular night to share memories of John T. Scott, a friend and mentor who died in 2005 in Houston. Yet it seemed as if somehow he’s still in the world, even walking with them through the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s main galleries as Mora Beauchamp-Byrd guided them through Rhythm & Improvisation: John T. Scott & His Enduring Legacy. That’s the title of the museum’s exhibit of Scott’s work shaped by African, Caribbean and New Orleans musical traditions. The work has been described as “optical jazz” or “visual blues.” The show runs through Sunday, July 14.

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“Review: Blame It on Vegas: Collecting Meta Modern,” Gambit

What do the rise and fall of empires have to do with Las Vegas? Probably not much except that both are marked by glamorous and grandiose symbolism. History is a roll of the dice, and somebody always loses. Empires were often fueled by visions of vast wealth, yet they eventually crumbled. Stephen Paul Day’s Blame It On Vegas exhibition actually focuses far more on European history than it does on Nevada’s Sin City, which is mostly represented here by his oversized paintings of tacky souvenir matchbooks. By contrast, his sculptures often feature mini-renditions of major figures in European history.

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“Alexander the Great,” Beach Magazine

As artist John Alexander – who splits his time between New York City and Amagansett – gets ready for a solo show at Guild Hall, he takes time out to chat with legendary New York artist and Sagaponack resident Ross Bleckner about politics in art and preshow jitters.

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“Stephen Paul Day’s Blame it on Vegas – Collecting Meta-Modern,” a Short Essay by Amy Mackie

A zebra leg, a copy of Mein Kampf, slave shackles—discrete objects laden with meaning and chosen for their obvious aura—are precisely the kind of curiosities one might find in collections housed at institutions such as The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Griot Museum of Black History, or the Mütter Museum. Contextualized alongside other anonymously created or found works, some humorous, some horrific, Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta Modern functions as a Wunderkammer, a collection that inspires infinite interpretations. The title is both a response to Robert Venturi’s controversial book Learning from Las Vegas and a rejection of postmodernism in favor of a new romanticism or what has come to be known as metamodernism. This slightly nebulous curatorial approach is, in a sense, a “metagesture,” where objects and ideas are abstracted and obscured. Oscillating between modernist vocabularies and postmodern strategies, but relying on neither, there is a rigor and a sense of purpose that unites this collection, though the precise meaning may not be, or may never be, fully realized.

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“Art critic’s picks for Saturday’s Julia Street gallery openings,” The Times-Picayune

Smart, sure and silky smooth, Gordy’s acrylic canvases from the 1970s and 1980s remain a high water mark in New Orleans art. Gordy was one of those painter’s painter; his every work is a lesson in color choice, value modulation and economical design. After all these years, I imagined I’d seen all of Gordy’s mid-career works, but the shaped canvas waterfall featured on the gallery website was a revelation

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“Homage to John Scott,” Art e-Walk

With John T. Scott’s preferred jazz tunes playing in the background, the Louisiana Art and Science Museum downtown Baton Rouge invites the visitor to look at the artist and his colleagues’ works during the exhibition Rhythm and Improvisation: John T. Scott and his Enduring Legacy.

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“From the Walls Out: Whitfield Lovell at Hunter Museum of Art,” American Legacy

About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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“Pattern Recognition: Stephanie Patton and Troy Dugas at Arthur Roger Gallery,” louisianaesthetic

Currently at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, two Lafayette, LA artists who bring pattern to the fore in their own works are exhibiting: Stephanie Patton and Troy Dugas. Within both bodies of work, the two artists begin with a simple premise, a minimum of materials, and a highly repetitive process. However, their finalized works speak to the complexity, beauty and meaning that can unfold from such humble and rudimentary origins.

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