curated by Natalie McLaurin Antenna Gallery, May 14-June 5, 2011 3161 Burgundy St New Orleans, LA My Mom Says My Work Has Really Improved is a group exhibition, curated by Natalie McLaurin, that explores the connection between artworks made at different times in an artist’s life. By using childhood work shown next to recent works of art, this exhibition shows how some themes, forms, and content stay with the artist over the course of a lifetime. Featured Artists: Lee Deigaard, Jan Gilbert , Dave B. Greber, Nicole Handel, Chase Markovich, Natalie McLaurin, Jeremy Pelt Ember Soberman, Galen Trezise, Ryn Wilson, Cayla Zeek As a child, I drew pictures, made puppets, sewed embroideries of raccoon faces. They were my totem animal, dominating childhood art imagery from the ages of 7 to 9. … [Read more...]
Pic(k) of the Week: PELICAN BOMB
A great new arts site has made me Pic(k) of the Week! http://pelicanbomb.com/home/post/115 … [Read more...]
In Your Dreams (Horses)
March 12, 2011 New works by Lee Deigaard consider the horse as significant Other. Featuring nocturnal portraits and video animations, In Your Dreams (Horses) explores proprioceptive awareness, relational mysteries, and the chimerical power of memory and yearning. Horses validate your most exquisite perceptions. They read your thoughts even as you form the words. In the pasture at night, darkness is a permeable membrane; your senses heighten. You encounter each other in the dark, partly real, partly figment. As a child, I collected plastic horses and pored over manuals of horse care. Absent a real horse, I was ready, if called, to muck out the Augean Stables. Hercules did a rush job, took shortcuts. I would have done it right, as ministration in service to a yearning. A dream of a … [Read more...]
Black Gold
I showed two new video pieces in response to the show’s theme. In one, the oil spill and its aftermath resound. In the second, a small black video in a big gold frame proselytizes for your amusement. In Plastic Gulf, plastic fishing lures swim through a false eden of lush plastic reeds. Animated through crude puppetry, they flirt with the viewer, become protagonists themselves rather than decoys. After the 2010 gulf oil spill, fishing lures collected dust on bait store shelves, and fishing boats idled. Marine life choked in the oil-polluted waters. In the Pacific Ocean there is a vast island of plastic garbage. Plastics are made from oil. Even before the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico's dead zones were growing, fed by fertilizer runoff carried by the Mississippi River from … [Read more...]
Louisiana: Trees Entwined
a group show curated by Wanda Boudreau The Sibley Gallery, New Orleans, LA, Dec 4-Jan 12, 2011 including works from my Vortex and Trees series: oils on panel, watercolor on clayboard, and ink drawings on paper Artist Statement: My drawings and paintings of trees are about modifying a language of shapes and marks to convey flow and rhythm. Seemingly solid, a tree holds volumes of air. The air eddies and swirls among its clefts, and the tree moves and gestures. Much of the vocabulary of movement-- of exhalation and inspiration-- reflects the capillary processes of trees. The fractal attenuation of trunks to twigs parallels the circulatory systems of humans and of rivers. An aerial photograph of the Mississippi Delta resembles a tree. Histologies from the brain’s seat of sensory and … [Read more...]
The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony)
by Holly Hughes The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony) is a new solo performance written and performed by 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, Holly Hughes and directed by Dan Hurlin. A blend of autobiography, animal behavior, and bald faced lies, the show is a comic/poetic meditation on a midlife crisis in the key of canine. After several years as a self-described "professional homosexual" spent preaching to the perverted and getting into the craw of the religious right, Hughes disbands her one (wo)man dog and pony show, takes a real job at a prestigious university, acquiring a small pack of dogs, and must ask herself" what is sound of one lesbian clapping? (Could it be barking?) "THE DOG AND PONY SHOW" by Holly Hughes at The Front, NOV. 18 @ 7:30 PM, doors at 7PM Holly Hughes is a … [Read more...]
Standing Heat: I am I because my [little dog] knows me
Curated by Holly Hughes & Lee Deigaard, featuring work by Kathy High Room 4 @ The Front Nov 13-Dec 5, 2010 In conjunction with Holly Hughes' performance of her new work, "The Dog and Pony Show", Standing Heat explores relationships between companion animals and humans. Small 2D works from an international call for entries respond to Gertrude Stein's assertion: "I am I because my little dog knows me," whereby "little dog" references any species of companion. Who is it whom your "little dog" knows, and how is your sense of self mediated through this relationship? Featured are new works by the internationally known new media artist Kathy High that consider interspecies communication and animal-human ways of thinking about one another. In "Lily Does Derrida", a video essay with … [Read more...]
I Am An Important Giant
group show curated by Natalie McLaurin Nov 13-Dec 5 2011 Antenna Gallery New Orleans LA Brooding, Failure to Incubate and Rumination are self-portraits of aspects of my studio process. Working in miniature scale encouraged the adoption of a different perspective, to imagine the view from outside the atelier/ bird cage. As I watched the oil plume hemorrhaging into the Gulf on BP's live cam and saw the subsequent images of oil-soaked birds, I felt impotent. I brooded and wanted to find a way to respond through my art. Being a sentinel is paralyzing work, sometimes. Pelicans are resourceful, gimlet-eyed masters of airborne acrobatics, but oil in their feathers grounds them and traps them. Incubating and hatching an egg, like getting an idea and making art from it, rely on a … [Read more...]
Nobody’s Asking the Sheep Anything
Here is the interview I gave to Fair Folks and a Goat. “Artist Interview: Lee Deigaard" Lee Deigaard is one of the first artists I found for Fair Folks & a Goat New Orleans, and I absolutely adore her work. As an animal lover myself, any artist that makes animals the subject of their creations immediately has my attention, and Lee’s thoughtful approach to her subject matter is apparent in her beautifully nuanced portraits. Below she shares some thoughts on her process, and states what is easily the most spectacular thing I’ve heard in weeks: I am dying to finger paint, perhaps while sitting on a tree branch, with an artistically inclined orangutan. What’s inspiring your work these days? A number of long term interests continue to sustain me. The perceptual experience of being … [Read more...]