Kevin H. Jones: solo exhibition in Tokyo

Digital Arts Professor Kevin H. Jones’ solo exhibition titled Strange Weather opened on July 30th at Art Lab Tokyo. 

Kevin H. Jones’ latest exhibition, Strange Weather, presents us with two new exciting bodies of work. This showing is an investigation consisting of collage, decollage, and digital montage. Jones incorporates charts, diagrams, and images from popular culture as tools of comprehension of the natural world. Building upon his past compositions, these structured forms and ordered systems provide a sense of clarity and control over the complexity of nature. However in this new exhibition, he challenges the perceived authority of these visual systems. Through the layering of charts and diagrams, Kevin disrupts their logical order, infusing them with ambiguity and suggesting alternative narratives. In doing so, he invites viewers to question the limitations of our understanding and to embrace the inherent mystery and beauty that lies beyond our comprehension. 

The physical and digital layering of Kevin Jones’ artwork becomes a metaphorical act, mirroring the intricacies and multiplicity of meaning found in our world. These layers embody the interplay between perception and interpretation, as they move in and out of coherence, shifting between meaning and nonsense. This fluidity echoes the dynamic nature of our existence, where meanings are not fixed but rather subject to the flux of individual experiences and cultural contexts. 

Ultimately, Kevin seeks to engage viewers in a contemplative journey. Through the amalgamation of digital processes, collage, popular culture, childhood memories, and the enigma of charts and diagrams, he strives to evoke emotion, ignite curiosity, and spark conversation. Kevin invites viewers to explore the shifting layers of meaning, to challenge the assumptions that underpin our understanding, and to embrace the beauty of ambiguity and the vastness of possibility.

#decollage #collage #ケビンhジョーンズ

Gene Koss: solo exhibition at Ohr-O'keefe Museum

Always an admirer of Frank Gehry's architecture, Gene Koss is excited to exhibit in a stainless steel Gehry designed pod on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum campus. The huge steel panels and exposed beams in the raw, unfinished interior of the pod contrast and complement Koss’s sculpture.

The exhibit covers a span of Koss’s sculpture career from 1990 to 2019 and was curated by David Houston, the Ohr-O’Keefe executive director.  Included is Arc, a large-scale sculpture of steel, stone and glass; Totem, a large wooden timber sculpture; as well as several multi-media maquette sculptures. 

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art  386 Beach Blvd, Biloxi, MS 39530
Open to the public:  10am-5pm Tuesday – Saturday; 1pm-5pm Sunday

Blas Isasi solo exhibition at The Front

"An idea is just the shape of a flower" is a solo exhibition of new work by Blas Isasi, visiting assistant professor of sculpture at Tulane. The exhibition will be on view at The Front from August 13 through September 4, 2022. nolafront.org

Artist Statement

The Peruvian coast consists of a long and narrow strip of desert squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, and crossed by a series of oasis-like river valleys. Given its long history of human occupation, ancient ruins have been one of this arid landscape´s most emblematic features. Abandoned temples and settlements that were gradually reclaimed by the desert sands were then turned into venerated shrines and cemeteries by subsequent kingdoms and their societies. After the Spanish conquest of Peru, this continued under new forms as those practices became more syncretic (e.g. witchcraft), together with the then nascent and still ongoing looting of tombs and temples. The latest development in this long history is the commodification of the past under a neoliberal regime that renders ancient artifacts and archeological sites as tourist attractions: inert, sterilized and “disenfranchised” relics of the past. Peru´s coastal desert is a scarred landscape, one whose scars work as mnemonic devices and indexical marks. Past and present populations have systematically engaged in a complex, dynamic and often conflictive process of negotiating memory through an editing process that sometimes involves the erasing of these marks, others their unearthing, resignifying and reinvention altogether resulting in a living palimpsest.

Following in the footsteps of numerous past Peruvian artists like Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, Juan Javier Salazar, and most notoriously Jorge Eduardo Eielson in making the desert a subject of their work, in "An idea is just the shape of a flower" I try to bring into play different key aspects, fragments, materials and symbols characteristic to this unique cultural landscape. By deploying various strategies, I intend to animate some of its most representative elements such as sand, clay, bones, etc. so as to put them in dialogue with each other in ways that seem counterintuitive, suggesting not only new connections and meanings but also other possible worlds. The accompanying presence of seamless metal structures in my installations hint to cartesian reason on the one hand, while evoking 20th century Modernist design on the other, the quintessential aesthetics that symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of progress in the context of the Global South. The resulting tension from the juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing sets of elements is meant to, in the words of Raymond Williams, convey a “structure of feeling”: the feeling of things before we are able think them; the feeling of a different world before we can imagine it. In short, mine is a humble attempt to reenchant the world and sow the seeds of hope in a bleak and perilous age.

Last but not least, this exhibition is meant as a heartfelt and critical homage to the arid and stunningly beautiful land I grew up on.

Kevin H. Jones solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan

"Absurd Thinking" a solo exhibition of new work by digital arts professor Kevin H. Jones, was on view June and July at Art Lab Akiba in Tokyo, Japan.

Kevin H. Jones' new body of work presents the viewer with a constellation of images from popular culture, and digital processes, to iconic childhood memories. In his latest exhibition, Absurd Thinking, Jones creates visually and physically layered digital prints that conceptually oscillate between meaning and nonsense. Building upon his past inquiry into our attempts to understand the natural world, the construct of charts and diagrams also traverses this new work. What is different is that Jones reveals his process by using calibration graphics related to the process of printing and by showing computer operating system floating menus.

The result of these choreographed juxtapositions seen in his digital prints and videos feels like one is flipping through channels on a TV or moving past the static of a radio dial as images coalesce and momentarily make sense.

For example in the work, Mixed Metaphor, a portrait of Frankenstein sits in a computer's operating system’s popup window surrounded by color and grayscale gradients. The portrait has been pierced with holes revealing the star chart layered underneath. A pixelated bird is perched to the left of Frankenstein. Amongst the organization of seemingly abstract ideas, one may wonder about the relationship of the bird with the monster.

Barry Stone Bailey (1952-2021)

 

With heavy hearts we share the news that sculptor Barry Bailey died in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, around September 1, 2021.  

 

Barry Stone Bailey was born on October 21, 1952, in High Point, North Carolina.  Bailey received his M.F.A. in sculpture from East Carolina University in 1978. His thesis exhibition was titled, "A Sculptural Response to Coastal Landscape and Environmental Space." In 1980 he came to New Orleans for the College Art Association Conference and never left. From 1980-1982 Bailey served as visual arts coordinator at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. He was one of founding members of A.J.A.C. Studio (Artists at Joliet and Cohn) with Mark Grote, Steve Klein, Gene Koss, Sandra Russell Clark, and others. Bailey served as supervisor for "Artworks '84" at the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans in 1984. 

 

In 1987 Bailey joined the studio art faculty at the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, first as visiting professor (1987-89), then assistant professor (1989-1993), and finally associate professor (1993-2010). Bailey also taught in the summer at the University of Georgia sculpture program at Cortona, Italy from 1992-1996.

 

Bailey is remembered for the many community iron pours, annual "River Day" events, and foundry shows in the Tulane studio and courtyard. In the sculpture community Bailey was known for his unique head furnaces for casting iron, themselves sculptures made of paper, clay, and sand. In 2002-2003 he exhibited in Italy and England, the only American exhibiting in the Canterbury Sculpture Festival, among a select group within the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey. In 2004 he served as one of the local chairs for the International Sculpture Conference in New Orleans with John Scott. 

 

His students were exceptional and of them he was most proud. Distinguished alumni of the Tulane Sculpture program during his tenure include Zarouhie Abdalian, Joseph Burwell, Thor Carlson, Allison Collins,  Maysey Craddock, Joseph Hillier, Jonathan Hils, Erik Johnson, Loren Schwerd, Cynthia Scott, and Phoebe Washburn. On his birthday in 2016, he wrote, "Thanks one and all, for all the kind greetings and well wishes on my birthday. Though I never had children, I had students much more interesting and brilliant than myself. It has brought me great joy to see them grow into well-adjusted men and ladies. Bon chance, to all my FB friends and colleagues alike, around the world wherever you may be remembered, we are one and never the same, or ashamed to be who we truly are. Carry on, brothers and sisters, and as John Scott used to say, "PASS IT ON !" 

 

2021 Faculty Awards | SLA Dean's Office

Outstanding Faculty Research Award

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Since 1994, Elizabeth has served as the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art. Author of six monographs, co-author of another two books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen other volumes, her work has been influential not only in art history, but in the related fields of history, anthropology and literary theory. In 2018, she was named the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, the first Latin Americanist art historian to receive this honor since its founding in 2001. She was also the first Latin Americanist to hold the Andrew Mellon Professorship at the National Gallery of Art in 2006-8. In 2010 she was Professor invitée at the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and recipient of the government of Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to Aztec scholarship. Her latest monograph book, Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021), is the first synthetic analysis of the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture created in the decades after the Spanish conquest. After 27 years at Tulane, Elizabeth is retiring at the end of this academic year. Her career at Tulane University has been extraordinary, to say the least, and we can think of no better tribute than to offer her the Research Award.

The April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Sean Fader

Since his arrival at Tulane in 2018, Sean has helped to rewrite curriculum in the photo area, separating darkroom and digital practices; he has also overhauled the digital and darkroom spaces, enhancing usability and access. His courses are always overenrolled and his teaching evaluations are superlative. Here are some examples of his student evaluations: “Sean is extremely supportive and knowledgeable about what he teaches. He makes material exciting, engaging, and relevant.“, and “He is Thanos with all the infinity stones.”

Art Chair Stephanie Porras says, “I would particularly like to praise Sean for making adjustments to his teaching this year – not only folding in the switch to hybrid teaching, but also readjusting all his syllabi to center BIPOC scholars and artists. By overhauling his syllabi in this way, Sean modelled what it means to decenter and question the artistic canon. He shared resources with other faculty in the department and encouraged all of us to revisit the readings and artists we use to teach the history, theory and practice of art.”

Faculty Awards Spring 2020

On Thursday May 28th, Brian T. Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, announced this year's faculty awards.

We are pleased to report that Teresa Cole, Professor of Printmaking, is this year’s George Lurcy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Professor Cole will spend a month in residence at the Academy working on a new printmaking project based on the intricate patterns and vibrant colors found in the medieval mosaic floors created by the Cosmati brothers. To inspire her new work she will study the mosaic floors and patterned columns in the Pantheon and S. Maria in Trastevere.

Faculty Research Awards were granted to the following Newcomb Art Department faculty: AnnieLaurie Erickson (Slow Light), Leslie Geddes (Weapons of Atlas: The Art and Science of Early Modern Cartography 1580-1650), and Kevin Jones (Decollage - a solo art exhibition).

Forging Strength: the Art of Labor

Gene Koss, Arc, installation view, Hibernian Memorial Park, New Orleans

The opening of Forging Strength: The Art of Labor, a new sculpture garden at Hibernian Memorial Park, will take place on Friday, January 17 at 10 am at the Celtic Cross Monument in New Orleans, located on the neutral ground between West End and Pontchartrain boulevards. (map) The guest of honor for the kick-off is Irish Consul General Claire McCarthy, making her first trip to New Orleans since her appointment to the Irish Consulate in Austin, Texas, last fall.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Earl Dismuke, Erica Larkin Gaudet, Hernan Caro, Gene H. Koss, Mia Kaplan and Tara Conley. The exhibit provides artistic representation of the immigration experience and supports the mission of the Irish heritage park to honor the contribution of the Irish in the Crescent City.

For more information contact Louisiana Hibernian Charity board president Jim Moriarty 504.616.3999.

Funding for the Hibernian Memorial Park sculpture project was provided by the Emigrant Support Programme of Ireland, with additional support from the Louisiana Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Hash House Harriers, the Irish Channel St. Patrick’s Day Club and Roubion Shoring and Construction.

Aaron Collier: Revival

Newcomb Art Department Professor Aaron Collier opened a two-person exhibition entitled "Revival" on October 24 at Octavia Art Gallery in Houston, TX. The exhibition runs through November 30.

“The “Everything You Need to Know” website that intends to prepare visitors to Palatine Hill in Rome offers the following caution: “Without a guide or guidebook, it can be difficult to make sense of the ruins of the Palatine… you don’t want to be one of those tourists who wanders aimlessly around the hill, with no idea of what they’re looking at.”

In September of 2017, Collier found himself to be just exactly that, a tourist without the benefit of a guide. It was the challenge of making sense of Palatine’s excavations and ruins, with their innumerable fragments, pieces, and remains, the profound inability to explain away or see through every layer, the overwhelming sense of bewilderment and mystery, that inspired the series Of Rocks and Ruins.

With these works, Collier implements several modes of image making towards squaring with the central questions that drive his research: “What to do with a small and incomplete knowledge of a vast, complex, and multivalent world? How are images, which are inherently shards or snippets of information, able to convey this inability to know in full?”.

Artwork: Fact and Spirit, 2018, Flashe on canvas, 38 x 38.”

CAA Conversations Podcast features AnnieLaurie Erickson

CAA News Today

 
The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

This week, Danielle Wyckoff and AnnieLaurie Erickson discuss professional practices.
Danielle Wyckoff is an assistant professor at the Kendall College for Art and Design at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
AnnieLaurie Erickson is an associate professor of photography and co-director of Studio Art Graduate Studies at Tulane University.

CAA podcasts are on iTunes. Click here to subscribe.

MENTORS exhibition in the Carroll Gallery

Please join us for the opening reception for MENTORS, an exhibition of work by the full studio art faculty of the Newcomb Art Department, Wednesday 8/28 5:30-7:30pm. 

The exhibition is on view August 21-September 25 at the Carroll Gallery, hours M-F 9-4.

Teresa Cole: Imperfect at Callan Contemporary through July 20

Teresa Cole, Infiltrate 2.0, relief printed Japanese paper with dye and bamboo, 72h x 60w in

 

In Imperfect, her fifth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary, Teresa Cole brings together patterns from disparate traditions in images of startling complexity and beauty. This body of work—a suite of intaglio etchings, woodcuts, and two installations, Black & White Patchwork and Infiltrate 2.0—stems from research the artist conducted last spring in Seville, Cordova, and Granada, Spain. There, in architectural masterpieces such as the Alhambra palace, she studied and documented intricate patterns adorning tilework, carved wood and plaster, wainscoting, stone flooring, and cut glass. Alternately geometric and arabesque (plant- based/organic), these motifs exemplify Moorish aesthetics, in which only the divine is considered perfect and artisans build small flaws into their designs to signify earthly fallibility. Cole has integrated many of these patterns into her existing lexicon of shapes, combining Old World printmaking techniques with digital photography, laser cutters, and CNC routers. “There’s a tension between these perfect, computer-formed lines and the imperfection of the hand,” she observes. “Those imperfections are evidence of our humanity.”

Cole earned a B.F.A. degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, then continued her studies as a member of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, Scotland. Currently she is full professor at Tulane University, where she teaches all aspects of printmaking. She has conducted research and participated in residencies in India, South Africa, Nepal, Belgium, Spain, and throughout the U.S. and has been commissioned to create large-scale public artworks, most recently a sculptural installation at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane. Her works are included in prestigious private, corporate, and institutional collections around the world.

Cole’s prints are densely layered, rich with a translucence and texturality that reward close viewing. Their thematic content is also highly layered, sometimes juxtaposing or overlaying Roman and Arabic scripts—as well as symbols from Asia, Africa, and the Americas—into images of poignant cross-cultural mélange. Technically innovative and pictorially opulent, the artworks posit a fluidity between ornamentation and language, visual seduction and conceptual grounding, and pattern as both decorative and narrative devices. One need not speak foreign tongues or be versed in art history to appreciate these pieces, however, for they communicate directly and subliminally with the viewer’s perception and subconscious. “Maybe it’s possible,” Cole suggests, “to learn about something simply by looking at it.”

by Richard Speer
originally published in Country Roads Magazine

IMPERFECT exhibition dates: June 1st - July 20th, 2019

CALLAN CONTEMPORARY 518 JULIA STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130

Sean Fader receives grant from Skau Music & Art Fund

The Newcomb College Institute's Skau Music & Art Fund awarded a grant to Professor of Practice Sean Fader to support a documentary photographic art project. Fader's description of the project follows. 

With the assistance of a grant from the Skau Music and Art Fund, I will spend eight weeks this summer crisscrossing the country, driving to all of the locations where queer people were murdered in 1999 and 2000. I will be photographing the locations with a Sony Digital Mavica, the first digital camera that was available at the time, to create a photographic archive of all the recorded queer murders. There is an immediacy to this project: It was exactly 20 years ago that the Matthew Shepard and the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was presented to Congress, expanding the definition of federal hate crime laws to include queer people.  It was eventually signed by President Barack Obama 10 years ago. Additionally, it is exactly 50 years since the Stonewall riots. However, the current administration is changing laws that have protected queer people. The trans ban in the military, the bathroom ban, and the religious rights movement all play a part in institutionalizing queer hate. According to LAMBDA’s Website, “the National Coalition of  Anti-Violence Programs’ ‘Crisis of Hate’ report [states that] 2017 was the deadliest year in recent history for LGBTQ+ people in the United States.” Queer people are still being murdered at horrific rates.

Workhouse Arts Center Presents Jeremy Jernegan 'Dwell'

Dwell is a solo exhibition opening on May 1, through June 2, 2019 at Gallery W-8, Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA of work by ceramic sculptor and Tulane University Professor of Art Jeremy Jernegan. The exhibition features a new body of ceramic and stainless steel wall sculptures that address climate change and its effects on oceans and waterways, that Jernegan produced during his residency at the Workhouse over the past 9 months.

Dwell explores our experiences inhabiting a world undergoing cataclysmic climate change and our difficulty grasping the enormous scale and consequences of our plight.  In these new works, Jernegan’s longstanding interest in water imagery and in the amorphousness of marine environments as metaphors for uncertainty and disorientation becomes a meditation on the profound upheaval that will be brought by a radically altered climate environment.

These are technically complex, multi-media works, consisting of large, geometric ceramic tiles made as ceramic mono-prints and enclosed in stainless steel frames.  Incorporating a range of detailed imagery drawn from maritime contexts, these works suggest a sense of physical precarity and transformation through their large scale, unconventional combinations of materials, and protrusion from the wall. This remarkable body of work intertwines the pictorial and the sculptural in an investigation into our relationship to and perceptions of our rapidly changing environment.

[via East City Art]

AnnieLaurie Erickson: Data & Art of the City

AnnieLaurie Erickson, Assistant Professor of Photography, is currently participating in two group exhibitions.  Data: BIG/-driven/Visualized, at Northern Illinois University Museum in Chicago is on  view through May 17, 2019. User Agreement (at left), a pigment print on habotai silk, incorporates the text from all of the Google user agreements since this practice began in 1999.  Art of the City: Postmodern to Post-Katrina, presented by The Helis Foundation, is on view at the Historic New Orleans Collection Seignouret-Brulatour Building, 520 Royal Street, from April 6, 2019 to October 6, 2019. The exhibition was curated by alumna Jan Gilbert (MFA, 1982).

Aaron Collier: "Knowing in Part"

Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor in the Newcomb Art Department, is closing a month-long solo exhibition entitled Knowing in Part on March 28 at Furman University in Greenville, SC.  As part of the closing reception from 6:00-7:30, he will be giving a Gallery Talk for the Furman and Greenville community. 

Collier teaches drawing and painting at Tulane. Solo exhibitions of his work have appeared at Octavia Gallery, Cole Pratt Gallery, and Staple Goods, an artist cooperative in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has been featured in “New American Paintings.”

Collier’s paintings are represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has enjoyed artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, ISCP in Brooklyn and OAZO in Amsterdam.
 
[Aaron Collier, Without a Flower, 2019, graphite on paper, 6.5 x 4.75."]

Faculty News: Aaron Collier at UMass

"Datum Drawing" gallery talk with Prof. Aaron Collier

Datum Drawing (February 4-March 8) is an exhibition that explores the use of datum in drawing as an architectural or spatial point of reference. A Datum Line is a line to which dimensions are referred on engineering drawings, and from which measurements are calculated. The term datum refers to a piece of information or fixed point of scale that serves as a reference in defining the geometry of a composition and in measuring aspects of that geometry to assess its relation to another value in space. Artists, architects, designers, engineers, cartographers and many others use datums to construct and define visual representation of space and place.  This show brings together two artists and   two architects who employ the use of datum lines in their work.

ARTISTS:

Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor of Art, Tulane University 

Perry Kulper, Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan 

Derek Lerner, NYC based artist

Tiffany Lin, Associate Professor of Architecture, Tulane University      

Curated  by Sandy Litchfield, Assistant Professor Department of Architecture

DESIGN BUILDING GALLERY
University of Massachusetts 

John W Olver Design Building #180
551 North Pleasant Street

Amherst MA

ASAP/10 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present will hold its 10th Annual Conference in New Orleans, October 17-20, 2018, hosted by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and Pelican Bomb. Wednesday evening, October 17th, the Newcomb Art Department will host the opening night's Artists Talk, the Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, "Machine Visions," with Trevor Paglen, at 6pm in Freeman Auditorium, 205 Woldenberg Art Center. 

The following Tulane faculty, staff, and students will participate as hosts, presenters, and moderators at ASPA/10: Adrian Anagnost, Amy Crum, Kate Baldwin, Laura Blereau, Courtney Bryan, Joel Dinerstein, Christopher Dunn, Brian Edwards, Megan Flattley, Denise Frazier, Eric Herhuth, Z’etoile Imma, Zachary Lazar, Amy Lesen, Monica Ramírez Montagut, Cheryl Naruse, Adriana Obiols, Christopher Oliver, John Ray Proctor, Ama Rogan, Matt Sakakeeny, Daniel Sharp, Rebecca Snedeker, Red Vaughan Tremmel, Emily Wilkerson, and Edie Wolfe. 

For more information, please visit the ASAP/10 website: https://asap10.tulane.edu.

Kevin Jones: Work from 2012-2018

Work from 2012-2018  by Kevin H. Jones, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department, will be on view at the Anderson, Virginia Commonwealth University's art gallery, from October 9 through November 3, 2018.

Over the past six years within Jones’ work, one can see transitions in and synthesis of media including painting, video, physical computing, and more recently, 2-dimensional digital prints. Through this synthesis of media, the conceptual investigation of the natural world through charts, diagrams and systems is a constant theme. His early work used solar energy to power a fictional television station, while more recent work uses sensors to create an interactive video installation that questions entropy. 

This exhibition is presented as part of the Anderson’s 2018–2019 Alumni Open Call. 

 

Aaron Collier: Of Rocks and Ruins

Aaron Collier: Of Rocks and Ruins October 6 – October 27, 2018

Octavia Art Gallery, 454 Julia Street, New Orleans

Opening reception: October 6, 6 – 8 pm *In conjunction with Art for Art's Sake

Abstraction, marked as it is by the ability to be both suggestive and silent, proves to be a fitting vehicle for exploring the possibility of paint to simultaneously reveal and conceal. This dichotomy parallels a shifting, evolving world where what we know consistently shares an edge with what we do not. Paintings in Of Rocks and Ruins layer observed positive shapes and negative spaces from historical works such as Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Hendrick Goltzius’ Pieta to the degree that the individual and original referent becomes difficult to delineate. Piecing together a knowledge or experience of something through remaining or available fragments mimics our daily interactions with the world. Rather than suggest that these interactions foreground a certain lack or shortcoming, I wonder if incomprehensibility can ever be a source of joy? 
 
– Aaron Collier 

Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Assistant Professor. This is Aaron’s first solo exhibition at Octavia Art Gallery. Previous solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District of New Orleans. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at The Clemente in New York and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Additionally, his work has been featured in New American Paintings and is represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. Collier has been awarded artist residencies by the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans), ISCP (Brooklyn), and Open Ateliers Zuidoost (Amsterdam).