The turn-of-the-century British occultist Aleister Crowley loved New Orleans, calling it “… the greatest city in America, with the best red light district this side of Cairo, a beacon of civilization surrounded by an intriguing wildness.”
Artifacts of a bygone era—barn doors, a spinning wheel, tin snips, playing cards, a revolver, a tin cup—are culled by Whitfield Lovell for his tableaux. All are worn smooth by the hands of individuals long dead, for whom these were means of diversion, labor, self-defense or sustenance. Lovell animates the lost narratives embedded in these personal effects with shadowy charcoal portraits based on anonymous studio photographs, some drawn directly on the artifacts, others on aged wood boards.
Annie Dillard wrote that “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. You need a room with no view so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
Nicole Charbonnet grew up playing hide-and-seek in the majestic, crumbling aboveground Lafayette cemetery in New Orleans. Today, she still lives in New Orleans, creating layered images on paper and canvas in which the present hides within the past like a child crouching between tombstones.
Tthe thing that distinguishes Polidori’s photos is the thing that is missing from them: people. Instead, the French-Canadian photographer, who once lived in New Orleans’s Gentilly neighborhood, illustrates the lives affected by Hurricane Katrina through the city’s abandoned buildings.
Ted Kinkaid invents unrealities through photograph, and in the process he reinvents the medium. If the photograph has always been about a negotiation between the original and the copy, reality and the ersatz, Kinkaid’s re-embodiment of the photographic image takes heed of only part of the equation.
Graceful, flowing and modern, Wave, the sculpture situated in front of the New Orleans Museum of Art, is a an apt reflection of its maker: Lin Emery.
Steve Rucker’s colorful installations are humorous commentaries on diverse social maladies, reminiscent of works by Claes Oldenburg – an acknowledged model – but informed sensibilities peculiar to the rural South.
Landscape painter Elemore Morgan Jr. says that as he stands at the edge of a rice field in the Louisiana heat and humidity, brushing flurries of fiery color onto oddly shaped Masonic panels, he can sense the curve of the Earth beneath him.
