New Art from New Orleans
@ Western Exhibitions
119 N Peoria St, 2A, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, February 25th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, April 2nd
A three-person group show organized by Keith Couser focusing on cultural production from New Orleans and South Louisiana. Featured are multi-media artist Stephen Collier and painters Brian Guidry and Rachel Jones.
Stephen Collier will be showing a new video, ceramics, photographs and collages, works that function as staged archeological finds. A recent sculpture CROATOAN is a freestanding, resin/fiberglass-cast sand dollar with an airbrushed beach scene on the front and jail-house hatch marks on the back denoting the number of days it took to plug the BP oil spill. Like the word “Croatoan,” Collier’s artifacts act as traces of lost settlements and are used to describe what has happened in South Louisiana and other parts of the gulf coast.
Brian Guidry’s intricate geometric paintings are seductive—tiny crackles and splintering shiny surfaces trip both modern and antique sensibilities. His paintings come from an interest in an almost alchemical transformation of material. Guidry states “I am interested in the forces and processes that produce and control the phenomena of the material world. The colors I use are sampled from the landscape where I am currently working in South Louisiana. Reflections from water, menacing storm clouds and September’s exhausted foliage are among the sources from which I reference.” The conversion of observed, natural color to painted color reflects his fascination with humanity’s manipulation of nature for consumption—the conversion of raw material to usable material.
Rachel Jones’ current paintings, vibrant impasto-ed oils on flexible plastic, hover between landscape, abstraction and phenomenological imagery. Jones will show a series of new small paintings as well as a separate body of work—sketchy, colored pencil contour drawings of Civil War Era denizens. Jones states “I begin the works by pulling photos and reproductions from public sources, both historical and contemporary. I then distort and abstract the images and use them as casual references. The paintings are executed on cut plastic sheets, and I borrow the crisp, clean borders and layouts from the world of design and advertising.”
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