The Saratoga Collection

Born: Waukesha, Wisconsin, 1985

Nan Goldin said that her work derived from the snapshot, that it is the form of photography that most closely stands for love. Similar sentiments and intentions can be said of Libbie Allen’s work, that her photographs are an act of love and tribute to the friends who serve as her subjects. Since following the Mississippi south from Wisconsin to arrive in New Orleans in 2008, Allen has explored the post-punk sensibility of New Orleans denizens with frank and intimate portraiture that speaks in themes of femininity and attitude. Her subjects are of a certain age (mostly Allen’s own), likening her to Rineke Dijstra, whose explorations of thresholds – children on the brink of adolescence, teens entering adulthood, as well as new mothers – call for a consideration of moments specific not only to place and time, but to the absolute of the artist’s moment. In the series, Girls, Allen depicts twenty-something women in the intimacy of their own living spaces, stripped down to slips, bras and panties. With Allen’s head-on approach, though the women are semi-undressed, their attire leaves them neither shy nor vulnerable nor terribly exposed. They possess the empowerment of Suicide Girls, assured affirmation of self projected to confrontation. In the two photographic prints on metallic paper, “Elizabeth with Expression/Nothingness Tattoos” and “Alesondra with an Excerpt from Her Story, Pink Passion,” (from the Halo series) Allen sets her subjects before sacred spheres. In Jungian terms, the self is symbolized by the circle; within the circle resides the unified consciousness and unconsciousness of a person. By lending the circle the religious context of a halo, Allen plays with the motif of spiritual exploration while safely securing her subjects in the absolutes of identity.

Born: New Orleans, LA, 1981

In 2010, Katrina Andry received her Master of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University with a concentration in printmaking. Her art combines digital media and color woodcut to create prints of white figures (who, according to Andry, represent Western-recognized figures of authority) in black face striking “generally perceived” stereotypes of black culture. These stereotypes include the pregnant teenager, the welfare collector, the whore, thug, sinner, and misguided teenage dreamer. In her work, “Genetic Inferiority: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and White Superiority” a white male is put in the pose of a black male sitting on the table portion of an old-school desk. He has a banana in hand, is scratching his head and is about to have his umbilical chord cut, severing him from a picture of Charles Darwin. Separated from science and knowledge, he will be set adrift onto a sea of perception, within the reality of “the other” who creates the institution of the un-evolved, the anti-progressive. Andry’s blunt-shaped woodcuts make easy reference to Elizabeth Catlett, the revolutionary social artist who utilized printmaking (amongst her many mediums) to contribute to social change during the height of the civil rights movement. Though our collective social circumstances continue to evolve, we are still engaged in open-dialogue with how art serves: politically, racially, as propaganda, or whether art should serve as a social tool at all, whether art is only for art’s sake. By engaging in themes of race and identity, Andry attempts to address this question.

Born: Alexandria, Louisiana, 1984

James Taylor Bonds describes his painting, “A Portal Experience: On Forstall New Orleans, LA” as “…a reaction to encountering a piece of destroyed architecture and immediately recalling a similar experience standing on a rural highway in Alabama. Upon seeing a contorted trailer on Forstall Street in the upper section of the Lower 9th ward, I remembered encountering a fallen home right outside the town where I grew up…the histories of both locations resonated in synch…The painting thus represents a duality of experience, a portal where one catastrophe informs the other, and the site becomes elevated with the grandeur of these projected realities.” Bond is interested in the impact memory plays upon reality. He seeks a Proustian truth where the current landscape summons the pure and unfiltered authenticity of an original experience. This process, though, does not project in a solitary direction. While gazing into his personal past, Bond is also caught in the swirl of the past superimposing itself upon the present. A solo show at Jupiter Art Projects entitled, “A Foray Into The Fictions Of Fractured Facades” featured a series of all gray scale paintings. The romanticism of muted grays, that invoke old and faded photographs, spoke of impermanence, solitary journeys, and the doubtful reliability of the process of recollection. Since then, Bonds has exhibited split panels conjoining portraits and landscapes to pattern the multiplicity of memory. Is it the individual who resides in the landscape of memory, or does an actual landscape, like some haunting song, contain the trigger that individual memory is in service to? It is through techniques and strategies of muted tones and psychic displacement that Bonds makes his investigations. “My art is frequently the result of hazy recollections,” Bonds says. “A blending of disparate events into one personalized narrative. It is the ingestion of one’s surroundings and memories, spit up in the guise of truth.”

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1982

If, as Freud says, all the components of our dreams reflect some aspect of our personality, then some similar decree should be put on Blaine Capone and the many reflections of Self contained in his paintings and drawings. But Capone is an elusive character, a New Orleans native who currently resides on a mountaintop near Ashville, North Carolina; he neither provides artist statements, nor has the type of singular-rhythm to his body of work that makes easily-swallowed assessments. What Capone’s work lends is a depiction of the post-post modern male psyche, a human persona self-mutilated, fragmented, incomplete, composed of wreckage, shy of its own brother-and-sisterly pieces, and consumed with self-investigations. His sometimes cartoonish, sometimes immaculately rendered (self)portraits address isolation, sexuality, violence, pleasure-seeking, and the need for some sort of human connection. A connection more often than not unmet. As in the work “medicine kid,” Capone often works with multiple canvases that reflect an almost-innate fragmentation in this age of despair. Here a young boy (Capone?) stands atop a beach ball, performing the balancing trick that will earn him the obscene dose of psychopharmacology either needed or induced upon him. The boy is vulnerable, partially naked, and reliant on the provision of an adult hand pictured descending towards the boy’s open and eager mouth. In Capone’s work there’s more than a little Philip Guston who, when he returned from abstract to human representation, painted the hand of God with an exaggeration of human veins and age, and who compiled his figures from parts and pieces. But by fragmenting the individual, putting multiple heads atop a body, setting his figures without discernible background, adrift from a social setting into a coldly isolated and discomfortingly uncertain narrative, Capone places his inquiry far more into the psychic condition than the corporal form.

Born: Kinder, Louisiana, 1969

Much of Anthony Carriere’s childhood was spent along the Calcasieu River in southwest Louisiana where Cajun French language and culture formed his image of the world. While studying sculpture at LSU (he would ultimately receive an MFA from Tulane) he began to explore performance art, conceptual art, process art and relational art. By process art Carriere contends that the means justify the end product. Carriere is prolific, his output diary-like. He is in a perpetual dialogue with Self and his work is the persistent evaluation of the monastic lifestyle of a working artist. A true multimedia artist, Carriere works in sculpture, photography and painting, his most potent efforts often commingling between. His acrylic on canvas painting “Gosh” offers a post-modern pop art still-life of organic life in flat scoop-shapes and soothing tones with the juxtaposition of text and the appearance of Photoshop-like symbols, as if permanently alterable. Other works are created on masonite panel painted over many times, tucking away images while Carriere follows each brushstroke, the application of materials such as graphite and copperleaf, to their earned conclusion. Carriere’s approach of combining process with imagery solidifies his intent to enhance daily routine into a conceptual act of thoughtful suggestion, lifestyle and personal philosophy. Art for Carriere is an event set in motion which the artist watches unfold. The final product contains the full extent of its meaning. Yet as Carriere’s system incorporates the complete immersion of his life towards transformative fulfillment, and his product the reflection of an ongoing development, so does it require the observation and reaction of an audience, a personal viewer, to serve as an integral component to the consummate process.

Born: Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, 1971

In a video work of Stephen Collier’s called “Five Finger Fillet”, a hand is placed with fingers-spread on a wooden tabletop while another hand stabs with a knifepoint at the space between each finger, intending not to prick the hand. It is a sailor’s game, a rite of passage amongst men. Utterly human, foolish, and inflated with a certain dignity, a certain bravado. Though the knife in Collier’s video crosses the hand back and forth only once, it provides insight into Collier’s interest in games, rituals, poses, and conceptual stunts. Any material or medium is susceptible to Collier’s games. He works in video, sculpture, sound, photography, painting, and performance. Food, picture postcards, 99-cent store items, electronic and found objects will find place in Collier’s work. In “Untitled (Black Hoodie)”, a lightjet print of a figure stands naturally, hands tucked in pockets, the jacket zippered to throat, the head semi-protected by the hood. One could expect to see this individual on any street corner were it not disfigured, the face completely covered in Silly String. The same can be said of the stature in “Untitled (Tuxedo)”. These figures are urbane and macabre; they might have stumbled out of the surrealist paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo or Ljuba, their faces caught somewhere between vegetable matter and cosmic uncertainty. Like the surrealists, Collier’s absurdity is serious. While based less on the subconscious than a response to urban environments, the pose of these figures is one of dignity; they stand self-assured, fully prepared to engage. Behavior, identity, the roles and context of daily life are all at play here. The rules of Collier’s games/stunts/conceptual stances are uncertain, as if defining them were also a game Collier himself has devised.

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1972

Since 2006, Bruce Davenport, Jr. has created more than 1,000 of his vibrant, meticulously hand-drawn marching band narratives. His process involves drawing the Mardi Gras parades with bands, tractors pulling floats, crowds, police in the street, the whole scene in immaculate detail. Davenport then makes two photocopies, and colors all three. One of the finished products will be donated to the school (if the school is still open; many never did re-open after Hurricane Katrina) of the marching band depicted, one Davenport will hold onto for himself, while the original drawing will be sold. The physical process, which can include up to 3,000 drawn figures, is only one piece of the puzzle. Since these parades have historical context, each of them plucked from the heyday of the great marching band eras, and since Davenport seeks accuracy, he will first talk with the band directors to tap their memories. He’ll watch films of the parades. Before ever setting pen to paper he’ll know how many percussionists, baton twirlers, how many flag carriers and clarinetists marched that day. Following its completion, the donated artwork is accompanied by a in-school presentation by Davenport, who sees his work not merely as a tribute to this integral facet of New Orleans culture, but as a means to sustain it. Davenport knows that pulling kids off the streets to integrate them into the marching band’s rigorous practice and tradition holds diminished value than it once had. Where there was once street credibility in wearing your band’s jacket, and band directors who earned respect by gaining hardcore criminals’ participation, the dissemination of the school system in the post-Katrina era has altered the potency of marching band reputation, which Davenport would like to see restored. His drawings literally draw the kids back in. They’re impressed by the scale of the work, Davenport’s personal dedication, and the integrity of this component of their culture. Rare is a work rooted deeply to the community, to its collective memory, and to its future all at once.

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1973

Rex Dingler, a former U.S. Marine and current ship’s captain on the Mississippi River, takes his art guerilla-style to the streets of New Orleans. He is the founder of NoLA Rising, an art collective that attempts to both politicize and beautify the cityscape with custom artwork in the form of paintings, murals and sculptures. While graffiti speaks-up without invitation and manages to question the assumption between art and culture, Dingler’s socially conscious work more closely emboldens the spirit of Bansky, the graffiti provocateur who has also made mark on New Orleans with unbidden street pictorial epigrams. While Dingler has been brought up on charges including 1,100 counts of illegally posting on telephone poles, his belief (which he lectures on at Tulane University) is that street art can be a legitimate cultural basis for urban rejuvenation. His “SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY, THIS BLOOD IS REAL” captures the essence of his street campaigns brought to canvas. The same block-letter stenciled text message with splattering of red paint has also adorned New Orleans sidewalks and buildings. Dingler’s work is a form of activism that astutely addresses the city’s cultural and civic climate. He is both interested in the man-on-the-street and the streets itself, its cityscape, architecture and geography, which Dingler also explores with architecturally-aligned abstracts and panoramic studies of city skylines. There is a school of thought bordering on mysticism that divines relationship between the shape of buildings and the mental and spiritual health of those who reside within them. Dingler, likewise, seeks the balance between a city’s denizens and their capacity to accept, and interact, with art. In addition to street and studio efforts, Dilinger works to promote art education and therapy programs for those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder issues.

Born: Houston, Texas, 1989

There is a gentle sentimentality to Hannah Downey’s work. Downey is nostalgic for what constitutes our animal nature, but an animal nature that nurtures, that is somehow bonded to the best of our humanity. Like a prehistoric mosquito preserved in amber, Downey’s paintings attempt to capture human essence at an evolutionary turning point between primal logic and civilized reason. But which side are we looking at? And is it the animal or human nature that best attends to the development of our civilization? The gorilla in Downey’s painting, “Exhale,” is tame. It embraces its own child, as well as the human mother holding her infant. The animal and human find placid symbiosis in the embrace of motherhood. Motherhood is one of Downey’s essential theme. Her viewer floats in primal waters, in the safety of wombs and a mother’s hands. Her paints seem as if mixed with oil, gesso, mother’s milk and bodily fluids. Backgrounds swirl and drip as if a penumbra between firmament and primordial ooze. They are a wash of white and gray with only a suggestion of blues and peaches. The birth of stronger colors are preserved for the figures that hatch and huddle, creating niche for themselves in the great expanse of space. Downey also creates ceramic, porcelain, and cast aluminum sculptures of human/animal hybrids. She makes homes and wombs of hands, and sets villages atop elephants backs. Her intent is to explore the mortal and tender vulnerability of human nature more often dismissed by the harsh reckoning of contemporary art.

Born: New Orleans, 1964

Painting for Keith Duncan is a means of storytelling, and in that process his narrative delves into the harsh realities of social commentary, his own childhood, politics, and the frustrations and satisfaction of artistic endeavors. In an effort to do so clearly, his canvases serve as narratives in which objects become symbols and keys into the autobiography of self-analysis and discovery. Duncan’s iconographic images of blacks in the American south echoes the works of Jacob Lawrence and Romero Bearden, yet his fragmentation and multiplicities also salutes the methodology of artists such as David Salle. Duncan’s painting, “Upon Return”, depicts an elderly couple standing reflectively before their cinderblock-supported home. In their hands they each possess a crutch: he a cane and she a bible. Perhaps these artifacts provide solace against the oppression of Empire looming above them in the shape of a municipal water tower, and against the pages of Time, which are escaping them. Their dancing days long behind them, mere apparitions now; they can only expect their bodies to shrink while the menace which pursues them grows larger. Yet we can also expect them to endure, to remain standing as long as they still possess breath. Behind the couple is a collage pattern which serves as both the painting’s and the couple’s background. Amongst bucolic scenes of white colonial America are couple’s on park benches, family picnics, rendezvous around trickling fountains. Yet these idylls never belonged to this couple, never had a chance of being theirs; and if these settings of pleasantry and pageantry had ever been promised, it was not one fulfilled. While making bold statements both personal and universal, Duncan taps his own subconscious in the effort to transform autobiography to iconography.

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 12/4/20th century

Brad Dupuy is interested in houses and homes and the distinction between the two. His acrylic paintings provide the sensual pleasure of strolling through a residential neighborhood wearing a pair of X-ray glasses. We are not merely peeping through windows, though; a fragmentation is occurring. Dupuy’s depicted existence has shattered into shards of human emotions, desires, and identities. Using techniques more easily associated with film and Photoshop, such as super-imposition and montage, digital layering and color fragmentation, the Self is often elusive; figures are blurred or disfigured by a host of household utensils and furnishings. The effect borders on a decorative panorama somewhere between Russian constructivists such as El Lissitzky, and Frank Stella’s geometric mosaics. But Dupuy’s terrain is human, not decorative. It is the urban residential setting that is the center of his observation. Dupuy fills his frames with layers of city street maps and fences; the inventions are demarcations, boundaries; they address sociological and psychological tendencies. In “Blue Neighborhood (Open Question),” the contemporary male is sealed inside a plastic notebook folder like specimen in a jar. His home environment is destroyed (echoing hurricane Katrina, as well as other natural and man-made disasters which disturb the tranquility of our living spaces), yet the objects which the Self clings to, here a favorite living room chair and a sandwich, persevere. The figure, slotted away, is secure in a world made safe by the designs of society. His home is razed but the lines of his city continues to be mapped out. There’s lunch to enjoy, as well as the distractions of entertainment, as depicted by the sort of lame but present neon window display. Humanity is persistent.

Born: Hawaii, 1968

Robin Durand is the son and grandson of painters and learned to paint from his father while growing up in Hawaii. He became seriously interested in painting when introduced to specialized color principles by George T. Thurmond and, later, Sammy Britt, Gerald Deloach and others. He gained a BFA from Delta State University in 1997 and an MFA from Louisiana State University in 2000. He also studied Traditional Chinese painting at the Xian Institute of Art, China. Durand has been painting landscapes for twenty years. A recent show at SolidAire gallery featured New Orleans street scenes in the softest pastel color pallet, the pink and orange hues of gentle sunrises and sunsets. His work “Removes Dirt and Stains” is from his Mondo Anachrony series in which Durand referenced and appropriated Old Master themes with twenty-first century concerns. The canvas “smashes together” the logo of Tide laundry detergent with Leonardo da Vinci’s “Deluge”, one of da Vinci’s unrealized masterpieces, which exists only in sketches. Superimposed are Fema trailers, making reference to Hurricane Katrina. The extreme subtlety of da Vinci’s aesthetic against the in-your-face claims of commercial advertising clash cataclysmically, enhancing da Vinci’s apocalyptic horror with post-modern consumerism commentary. Durand sees himself in great conversation with art history. His interest in landscape lies in its mutable nature and ability to be broken down into shapes and colors. He works to circumvent the habits of memory and assumption by reissuing a landscape’s believability in the shape of a new vision.

Born, Loma Linda, California, 1979

Both Aubrey Edwards’ “Jen” and “Miss Pussycat” recall the neon gloss of the 1990’s hyper-overindulgent images of Rolling Stone magazine photographer David Lachapelle, as well as the frenetic energy of MTV (back when it played music videos). Portraits of supercharged personalities colliding with readymade props shining like diner chrome. Photography and music have savored a particular bond since the 1950’s, when the pin-up celebrity of musicians became indistinguishable from a musician’s product: their music. Edwards continues the tradition of narrated scenario photography, carefully staged portraits that makes characters of character. Like Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger, Edwards uses mise-en-scène to draw a subject’s essence, while at the same time lending enough narrative power to determine a force of personality outside the realms of traditional portraiture. Edwards applies a vertical format versus the traditional horizontal to landscape and still life photography. In her Chippewa Falls series, a selection of images shot while staying on the Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation in Northern Wisconsin, Edwards confines water, landscape and trees into the vertical, assigning personality to terrain and juxtaposing them side-by-side local residents. Edwards’ approach, combined with her interest in music, gained application and national attention in the Where They At project, which chronicled the origins and scene of the New Orleans bounce music phenomenon. The project, in words (collaborated with journalist Alison Fensterstock) and pictures, was exhibited in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Photographing the DJs, producers, rappers, record store owners, promoters and journalists of the bounce scene, Edwards’ ability to excavate personality grants clear testament to the individuals who comprise a decades-long, community and culturally defining, movement.

Born: Opelika, Alabama, 1978

With an interest in fashion, interior design and furniture, Heley Gaberlavage contemporizes the out-dated with a sentiment for bygone attitudes and appearances. Her acrylic on paper, canvas and panel paintings shimmy in two directions: towards the decorative, where Gaberlevage explores a long-time infatuation with Danish design, and in an Alex Katz-like sociological portraiture where innocence is equally dispersed amongst irreverent youth and the Americana working-class of Gaberlevage’s Alabama roots. Her pallet is distinct, a preference for turquoise blues, hunter greens and olives, muted tones and an often thin or even unfinished background surface. This technique of background evaporating into swarthy brushstrokes allows Time into the work, the acknowledgment of memory, which is imperfect, always unfinished, and congruous to the retro aesthetic and mood. Notable is when Gaberlevage simultaneously pursues fashion and painting, such as in “Red Dress,” which features a figure in a huge, swirling, near-impossibly designed dress that recall the Japanese flourishes of Issey Miyake and Kenzo. Gaberlevage’s women sustain cigarettes and cocktails late into the night; they wear party-dresses and gather in rooms of 1970’s décor. They are poised, stained and sainted like Elizabeth Peyton’s permanently androgynous youths. Gaberlevage manages to carry the mystery of youth into older subjects. There is something disturbingly innocuous in the male subject of “The Devil Made Me Do It”. He stands with a blackened eye and a head-cocked smirk in a New Orleans mug shot. He is one of those always-reported-as “good quiet neighbors” that tend to follow certain atrocity. But should his unreadable appearance indict him? Gaberlevage, to her merit, gives us little to go on. It is mood and temperament the viewer is left with. Gaberlevage works fast, is prolific and unafraid to shift directions while still maintaining certain disciplines. She has recently forayed into Rothko-like abstracts, exploring moods with a few lines of foreground and wide planes of undulating-color space. It is the sort of departure intrepid artists make.

Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1982

Our physical self is never solely a matter of biology. According to Carl Jung, our Persona, the mask we show the world, has always been a matter of intent, of projection, a process of individuation integrating the conscious and unconscious with a battalion of archetypes slithering their way up through the collective. With contemporary digital extensions, our personas have now entered into a terrain of avatars, screen names, identities assumed for on-line dating and social networking. According to Dave Greber, NanoSwarm Projections “attempts to unify these spirits into a new composite entry and personify them.” In preparing his NanoSwarm videos, Gerber shoots ten to twenty “first-world, 21st Century humans” in front of a green screen, each going through the same emotions and expressions. Using mattes and a painted background, a kinetic, multi-leveled portrait is formed, a new digital composite of personas projected into yet another digital reality. Born in Philadelphia, Greber studied media production before moving to New Orleans, where he began producing videos. In 2009 he began to create site-specific video installations, as well as video commentaries that broke down the language of corporate propaganda with skeleton “commercials” built from the tone, cadence, verbal and graphic illusions that comprise a corporate campaign. In “PumpkinPencil™ by SquashScribe ®” Greber attempts to take what he calls the “parasitic language” of television commercials and covert it to “viewer empowerment” by making the commercialized product and the means to market it absurd. A series of actors in a studio environment sell a preposterous product with a catalog of promises and corporate spin slogans in endless loop. The hypnotic manipulations of commercialism are employed to objectives which border somewhere between a Saturday Night Live sketch and an authentic commercial experience, enabling a viewer to question their participation in a free-market commercialized system.

Born: Hartford, Connecticut, 1976

Death – since its experience is inexorably bound to this side of things – is life. It is not life’s negation but exists within life’s continuum. How else do we calculate loss, absence, even decay if not with the vocabulary of the living? We know nothing of death, which is why art is in charge of its representation, and has made many an investigation: Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, Edvard Munch’s Sickroom, the ecstatic horrors of Bosch, Klimt’s Death and Life, Waterhouse’s drowned Ophelia, just to name a few. We’ve got Hamlet contemplating the firmament and grave, Ingmar Bergman’s black-robed scepter-wielding and chess-playing specter, and Damien Hirst’s vivisections. All of these representations are merely our way of gazing through the glass onion. Art is always life, even while addressing death. Art asks: What does death look like? And: Why does it not look enough like death? Grissel Giuliano has photographed a series of dead chicks and found death wanting. The death she found was not nothingness, but somethingness; a dance of poses that does not demand to be buried, but instead invites one to extend a finger to tickle its still-cute fur. The viewer understands they are not looking at a living bird (nor a representation of a living bird), but the ghoulish playfulness that death sometimes lends itself. It could be like laughing at the brain-munching undead of countless movies, which amuse Giuliano among the many. Giuliano’s death is a curio, like the peeled and posed of the Bodies exhibitions, or Damien Hirst’s lambs and sharks in vitrines of formaldehyde. Giuliano demonstrates that no subject is off limits to art. Death belongs to art as much as to the mortician or the clergy. Art, in fact, owns those, too.

Born, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1982

From the 1880s through the 1920s, blue-lettered white tiles identifying street names were installed into the cross-walks city-wide. Those original tiles were cast in Alhambra, Spain, and imported into New Orleans by an American company, which went bankrupt when the stock market crashed in 1929. Since then, natural decay, the great roots of proud Live Oaks, and the electrical workers of Entergy, have been steadily destroying the tiles. Nick Hasslock, the son of ceramicists, was approached by a New Orleans city civil engineer for a recommendation on who might be capable of recreating the tiles. Hasslock proposed himself, and earned the commission. Thus far Hasslock has cast 3,000 tiles, replacing those throughout the Mid City, Garden District and Bywater neighborhoods. Each individual tile is slipcast in a plastic mold with its signature blue letter syringed directly into it while heating. The craftsmanship and patience of Hasslock’s work attracted Saratoga Collection curator Terrence Sanders as Sanders sought an artisan to create the Hurricane Katrina memorial, which was to be included into the Saratoga Building. The memorial will include the names of the 1,800 documented victims of Hurricane Katrina. Composed of several conjoined pieces of granite, each name is sandblasted by Hasslock, and will be mounted onto a wall outside the Saratoga Building.

Born: Hinsdale, Illinois,1985

Whether painting is dead, injured, or standing well within shiny patent-leather mary janes, there will always be place in the permanently-contemporary art scene for the whimsically imaginative, where the human terrain is infused with the symbolically and engagingly fantastic. Having spent her formative years in Hollywood-styled Southern California, Hill has carried to the American South a tradition of imagined time and place, a world of fairy tale illustrations with the fanfare of Gustav Klimt. Marked by a rich saturation of color, her paintings are a collage of the human and ornamental imbued with the theatrics of situation and costume. The decorative made flesh, as in “A Dress for Mum and Babies,” echoes Egon Schiele; but unlike Schiele, Hill’s figures are never solitary. Their pleasure principle requires the joyful indulgence of participation sometimes but not-necessarily human. In the tradition of Lewis Carroll and past-era Disney animation, Hill grants her humans company both animal and flora, anima and animus. The faces of the figures in “We’re All Mad as Apples Here” are replaced by apples, yet the characters dance in a lush field of fallen golden-leaves, costumed in sequined ball-gowns and pantaloons. As is the right and rite of art, utterly absent are limitations. “Barnacle” is pure Pre-Raphaelite. Peacock-feather etched silk pillows, a fascination of fabric folds, and sumptuous human skin giving way to mythology in partial transformation towards the flesh of a sea creature. While lending her vision to the art and wardrobe departments of film and television productions shooting in the south, Hill currently is at work on Carnival Mamou, a collection of oil and pastel depictions of the somewhat clandestine Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations that take place in the rural towns of Louisiana.

Born: Huntsville, Alabama, 1969

The conceptual investigation of the natural world through charts, diagrams and systems is a constant theme of Kevin H. Jones’ work. Jones makes use of cameras and computer programs that do useful tasks like tracing the development of cloud-charts using primitive techniques that harness energy. He places manmade systems in organic systems that include typography on leaves. Other work utilizes solar energy to power a fictional television station, and incorporates sensors to create an interactive video installation that questions entropy. In Muybridge-like grid presentations, Jones studies the progression of a snail over a small space for 396 frames, while another details the extinguishing of a candle’s flame. Here Jones is providing us a framework of life on the minutest level, in almost humanly imperceptible increments. Painting, video, computing and 2-dimensional digital prints are all components of his work. Jones’ piece, “Hunter,” includes a drawing of a person in a dog costume, an illustration of a snake, and a blurred astronomical chart. Here is a balance of relationships of natural order. The “acted” dog serves as a metaphor for a human inability to comprehend nature on an instinctual level, while the snake serves as a reference to the books from which knowledge is derived, our empirical experience which, according to Jones, is unfortunately obtained through textbooks. Jones’ graphic sensibilities dictates that the heavens are beyond us, yet we are able to attempt order, endeavor to create a sense of harmony from our confusion, to utilize scientific knowledge as a bridge towards organic comprehension. Art, for Jones, is that attempt.

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1981

Barbie L’Hoste’s canvases and painted porcelain slabs serve as prismatic lenses into the weird wonders of a Technicolor childhood. Sentiments of nostalgia and lost innocence are some of the purveying emotions in the multi-layered dreamscapes that contain both adult yearning and juvenescent astonishment. Utilizing collage techniques, L’Hoste color-copies figures found in vintage storybooks and encyclopedias, shrinks or enlarges or revises their orientation to be placed, diorama-like, into fantastic scenes of indeterminate narrative, yet suggestive enough to trigger emotional states nearly intra-uterine. The assemblage of children and figurine adults evokes the panoramas of Henry Darger, while the layering and kinetic juxtaposing bares comparison to Terry Gilliam’s animation work for Monty Python. L’Hoste uses collage to build-up the landscape. Fabrics, bits of wall paper, wrapping-paper, mesh netting, materials which provide both texture and manage to tickle sensations associated with near infancy. In the painting, “I don't let it bother me, do you let it bother you?” L’Hoste combines her signature found figures in an environment that defies reason and physical limitations. The air is filled with flying ships and sea pigs (one of the most scientifically unknown and abundant deep-dwelling sea creatures). There are dancing spuds and an odd adult figure tossing plush creatures for the amusement (or perhaps need) of the children far below. The painted landscape is lush, with fat brushstrokes of child-safe colors filling in skies, seas and cliffs, all of which securely support the children. Safety is key in these works. If there is menace, as there occasionally is in L’Hoste’s work (as there is in most every fairytale), the children contained within do not sense it. Vulnerability is also their fortification, which would be a slightly unsettling paradox were it not also this mix that makes L’Hoste’s works so appealing.

Born: New Orleans, 1972

In Peter Greenaway’s film, Drowning by Numbers, the Skipping Girl counts and names the stars, and perhaps that’s a wise way to approach the whimsical constellations that comprise Chris Jahncke’s drawn and collage-assembled compositions. With exuberance and surreal playfulness, Jahncke combines abstraction and figuration into a stratosphere of tiny details assembled into dynamic systems. In a dance between order and chaos, Jahncke shuffles between the micro and the macro: what’s to be found upon closer examination, and what’s to be experienced from afar. He is interested in patterns, repetitions, and collage. Jahncke’s imaginative bio-and geo-morph drawings collect into a stew of space. An accusation of clutter can be made, and Jahncke’s acknowledges that parts of his assemblages are gathered recycled scraps from off the studio floor; but layering for Jahncke becomes an act of geological excavation for the viewer. Where we seek the recognizable, a parody of Euclidian forms stare back; we seek the heavens and the heavens stare down, as in Percy Shelley’s “Hymn to Apollo”:

The sleepless hours who watch me as I lie,

Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries

From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes.

Jahncke’s “Mental Scraps” is a creation of stream-of-conscious, Pollack-like impulse and process where drips are replaced with forms related to biology and archetypal symbols, anything that came to mind when the brush and pen hit the paper. Jahncke’s works evoke Miro, Klee, and certainly Jean Dubuffets’ Hourloupes, but according to Jahncke are the “psychic siblings” of a Hundertwasser: bright colors, organic forms, a rejection of the straight line, and the reconciliation of human and geological nature.

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1950

While serving in the U.S. Navy, on a tour of Vietnam from 1969-1971, Bruce Keyes traveled throughout East Asia taking photographs with his first camera. The survey of an overseas experience leant him the confidence to return to New Orleans as a working photographer. In his near forty years of experience, Keyes has taken on several surveys, his black and white photographs comprising Spirit of New Orleans being the most notable. This iconic collection, which comprises thirty years of Mardi Gras parades, second line funeral marches, Jazz Fest and street musicians, as well as a plentitude of daily New Orleans moments, comprises a book, as well as two separate solo exhibitions, one at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, the other within the George and Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art in New Orleans. Equally as significant as the particular rendering of New Orleans spectacles are the faces of the individuals which fill them. Rarely does one of Keyes’ images fail to provide a singular, and often unexpected, expression: the momentous intent of a performing saxophonist, the rapture of revelers, the discarded sorrows of working class men who have been chosen to don honored Mardi Gras costumes. It is this investigation into human nature and the meaning of expression, gesture and timing that Keyes brought to his Weapons of Choice series, of which “Tatania” is part of. Keyes invited an open forum of individuals to be photographed brandishing their favorite weapons. He shot thirty individuals in full figure before an enormous American flag. While the study deals with individual fascination of weaponry in today’s society, specifically in America with it’s diehard-grip on the 2nd Amendment, there is a duality to the meaning of weaponry in this urban, violent, and yet ethereal image. By leaning into the phalanx of a lily, is Tatania, with her foreign-sounding name, turning, finally, away from a cycle of violence and towards nature, or is she commenting that nature itself is an innate component of human aggression? Keyes provides no definite answer, indicating only that to stand empty-handed before the stars and stripes is not an option

Born: Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1987

Every iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, and other unnamed, soon-to-be-obsolete Personal Digital Assistant has a To-Do List application. This post-post-industrial age (if that’s where we are) still recognizes that humanity needs such lists. The invention of the Post-It Note served as the ultimate papyrus for the To-Do list. Lily Tomlin devised her character Trudy, a bag-lady, so covered in to-do lists that a decent breeze might have blown them away, leaving us to find her bodiless. Individuals, communities, entire societies can be compartmentalized into To-Do lists, at least that’s what Stephen Kwok seems to present with his “To-Do Lists: New Orleans”. Kwok sent a task-force of twenty to hit-up random people in various New Orleans neighborhoods and asked them to write a to-do list for the rest of their day. Afterwards, Kwok colleted the lists and taped them into a clean grid onto a wall as a sort of memorial. Where most memorials stand to commemorate calamities, though, Kwok’s wall, like the to-do list itself, stands-in for something much more fleeting, transient, bound to the blink-of-the-moment. What is on the lists? Someone probably scribbled: Pick up milk, while another might have scribed: Don’t forget to believe in god. There is each list in their individuation, and there is the conceptualization of their collection, which stands in for society itself, its needs, desires, self-identifications. Other “projex” of Kwok’s include having individuals write open letters to their arch-nemesis, which Kwok posted in long tassel strands on telephone poles in the New Orleans Bywater neighborhood. He has also projected questions such as: What If You’re Not So Special on gallery walls, played word-games by applying single words onto a collection of protective eye goggles lenses, and made other lists, including his “Incurable Appreciation,” a Top-100 Influencers which gathers Confucius, Coco Chanel and Christopher Columbus (just to stay with the Cs), and that includes their fabricated average annual income and net worth at death. Hi-jinx, conceptual forays, individual and societal inquiry: art.

Born: Norwalk, Connecticut, 1969

Our collective visual and literary investigations of animal-human syllogistic relationships is nearly limitless. Is it a matter of imagination, or simply envy for what our bodies will never obtain? To defy gravity, live in sky and breathe underwater, to run with gazelle velocity. Miranda Lake carries on the investigation with cabinets of curiosity that harvest the insect and animal kingdom into landscapes inescapably altered by human intervention. She assembles encaustic collages of found objects and photographs that are sealed in a pigmented beeswax, an art-making technique dating back to ancient Greece. Wax has long been a substance for the collection and physical preservation of insects. It was also the sealing agent that bound the feathers of Icarus’ wings, which both allowed him flight and ultimately sealed his fate. The Icarus association seems apt to Lake’s work. In “Refinery”, from Lake’s reclamation:360˚ series, a flutter of luminous butterflies cling, as if feeding, to the cooling and exhaust towers of an industrial refinery. While humanity is reliant on technology to make up for our physical insufficiencies, nature, in Lake’s work snuggles up to our machines, our industries. In “this could be the ride of our lives” Lake makes exploration of the landscape surrounding New Orleans as the flora and fauna reclaimed the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast. Here birds encircle the undulating steel of a rollercoaster, detritus from the Six Flags amusement park, that remained underwater (as if sealed in beeswax) for a month following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. The ride, which sees no more human visitors, has become ornithological property. By combining human industry with animal fortitude, Lakes anthropomorphizes the animal kingdom while acknowledging our own primordial resources.

Born: Rijeka, Croatia,1971

Srdjan Loncar’s Fix-a-thing project involves going out into the world to repair damaged objects with close-up photographic images of those objects. In “Fix-a-thing (Bricks)” he mends a broken stoop in front of his house with photographs of bricks sculpted to Styrofoam shaped like bricks. Loncar is cavalier with camera settings. If the camera picks up a blue tone due to lighting, then that is what the sculpture (because that is what the fixed thing becomes) is made of. Included in the Saratoga Collection is an archival inkjet on aluminum print of “Fix-a-thing (Deer)”, in which Loncar renovates a pair of (fake) deer antlers with rods and foam covered with photographs of deer antlers. We take a steep step down the recess of representation when we represent a thing with a representation of the thing which the thing represents. But Loncar’s theoretical intent also remains on surface level (albeit perhaps skating the surface upside-down) when he suggests that his Fix-a-things might also act as fast-patch duct tape solutions for our crumbling environs. Practical or not, the mixing of near-utilitarian function with artistic intent makes Borges-games of everyday experience. It is the Photoshoping of real life. The representational replaces the real with an approximation that only slightly exaggerates its functional impermanence. Loncar’s featured Prospect.1 project involved creating a bank of fake-money sculptures installed at the Old New Orleans U.S. Mint. The historical precedence of currency printing combined conceptually with a demonstration of value as tellers offered sales of the sculpted money for investors to take home. Also shown during Prospect.1 was Loncar’s “Burning Hummer”, a toy car spouting an inferno of flames made from the images of burning oil wells in Iraq. Here Loncar managed to fuse consumer consumption with environmental cost, illustrating the power of art as socio/political commentary while maintaining aesthetic and spectacle.

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1982

Colin Meneghini’s painting “Carrollton Junction (Story of Tyrone),” describes the homeless habitation of man named Tyrone who once resided beneath the Carrollton Overpass near Tulane Avenue. The work makes manifest Tyrone’s travels, travails and marginalized displacement through the depiction of city spaces. In New Orleans, the swath of mediums segregating roadways are referred to as “neutral grounds,” but Meneghini offers spaces which are anything but neutral. They are instead menacing, isolating. They provide commuter efficacy and neighborhood divisions, but they can also be spaces of the abandoned, their function shifted from service to basest survival. From Tyrone’s perspective they become residences, and places of concealment. Meneghini’s canvas is a free terrain with a multiplicity of perspectives and demarcation lines, planes within planes, just as Tyrone will create a myriad of personal territories from urban vistas. The canvas studies architectural structures, but not the sort that would do an art and architecture student (which Meneghini has been) any good. Instead, the assessment of city infrastructures becomes a journey through them. Meneghini takes us on one man’s passage, a Robinson Caruso stranded amongst concrete and steel, where it is always twilight, and shadows provide both haven and hazard. Tyrone, like Caruso, is alone. Instead of a footprint providing the first hint of humanity, Tyrone has the overpass, the highway billboard, a skyline thick with electric and telephone lines. Meneghini manages to profoundly personalize the landscape; it becomes the inner-scape as well as outer. Tyrone’s impasse manages to become Meneghini’s guiding principle, aiming the viewer’s gaze towards the overlooked, summoning a relation to spaces that are often traversed but rarely seen.

Born: Englewood, New Jersey, 1983

Behind the frail papers on which Layla Messkoub’s works are ultimately printed is the trembling enthusiasm of the child who discovers, on a fall walk, a perfectly preserved leaf transformed in color by the season and filled with a near perfect symmetrical terrain of veins. It is the type of wonderment that never leaves an artist interested in the shape of things. Messkoub is concerned with textures, details, the strange living tapestry of the natural world endlessly bifurcating, spiraling and conjoining into patterns only the trained eye traces. Messkoub’s colleges incorporate hand drawn elements as well as woodcuts that have been printed on varied papers that are then cut and reassembled. The reconstructions emphasize and reconfigure relationships, patterns, and create new movements. Her woodcut collage, “Man-o-War III,” depicts the ascension of a bloom of jellyfish. If the swim of a million spermatozoa upon a single ovum were a ballet, they would have this sort of momentum: dynamic and sensual, purposeful and potent. Messkoub studied relief printmaking at Columbia University. She has traveled extensively through Central America, Europe and Central Asia. While textural inquiry allow Messkoub to incorporate such materials as sisal, jute, twine and human hair into her work, it is the arabesque found in birds and spotted fish, flowers, bee wings, roots and other living matter that sets the eye a’dance. Messkoub’s work possesses some of the investigations of Ernst Haeckel, though where Haeckel was a naturalist who sought to define the natural world with meticulous drawings of the plant and animal kingdom, Messkoub seeks to draw poetry from predetermined forms. A cross-pollination of living and industrial matter are at play. New conversations on what classifies the natural order of things are summoned. Just as one area of our collective imagination seeks to combine flesh with technology, so does another component maintain a morphological gaze on our biological origins, finding endless fascination in the elemental. Messkob’s work belongs to the latter.

Born: Detroit, Michigan, 1971

When Henri Matisse brought a collection of African masks to Pablo Picasso’s studio, an introduction of the primitive was made in modern art, an investigation which has sustained itself from the modern through the post-modern era. Think Paul Gauguin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chris Ofili. The visual arts continues to be concerned with primal forms as depicted by totem shapes and strong colors, a seeking out of the pulse and raw energy contained at the source of things. Tony Nozero combines a tradition of folk and primitive paintings with new-meets-old-world funkiness. Nozero was a long-time drummer before trading drumsticks for paintbrush. Self-taught, he paints instinctively and from that process draws forth innate shapes and human forms against a backdrop of often joyous primary colors. Nozero’s painting style could be called innocent if Nozero was not so smart, if he was not also socially attuned to the decrepitude, corruption and persistent celebration of his personal New Orleans. His painting “Stolen” was adapted from a tiny flyer he found in the streets following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, when life in the city was still quite precarious. The painted text is a direct record of that flyer, and the child-like drawing of the car is Nozero’s painterly transcription of modern technology returned, along with his city, to a state of forced chastity, lawlessness, and a ravaged but unrelenting Eden. “Usually my process isn't that obvious,” Nozero says. “My usual thing is to go in there and just begin making marks until something begins to make sense. Out of frustration, or maybe just process, I'll find a path and the painting finds a way out. It usually has nothing to do with the original idea, but is a deeper version of it, more subconscious. Art can be quite liberating, and is much cheaper than a therapist.”

Born: Durham, North Carolina, 1973

In his recent Self-Portrait as Bunnies series, Alex Podesta creates full-size sculptures of himself in bunny costumes. But they are more than just costumes. Podesta’s is a sort of Dostoyevskian doubling, the kind that Darren Aranovsky has explored in his recent film, Black Swan. We are dealing with the sort of doubling that instantaneously makes its own claims, that possesses if not life, than a projected persona that has the ability to turn itself on its creator with demands of its own. Podesta’s public artwork, “City Watch”, has a tribe of five full-size Podesta-bunnies keeping watch from over the roof of the Falstaff Building in Mid City. Across the street is the New Orleans city jail. Are these child-fashioned yet adult-framed sentries eyeing for escaped convicts? Or is this a advantageous point to attend for incoming weather, storms, future hurricanes? Having projected himself into the shape of these chimeras, Podesta brings new contextualization to the dualities of his own hybrid-being: the boy and the man; the dreamer and the creator; he who fantasizes and he who takes control. Childhood innocence and adult knowing have been fashioned into a singular form, and that form repeated. Podesta’s “Self-Portrait as Bunnies (Hubris)”, has a pair of bunny-men performing surgery on a toy bunny. What is the over-weaned pride to which the “hubris” in the title refers? Have these Podesta-creations now out to assemble their own creation taken their evolution one step too far? On the floor beside their surgery is a mask of Podesta’s face and an issue of Art Forum. Are these ingredients all it takes to engage in the creative process? By projecting himself into nascent self-confrontation, Podesta engages in a multifarious game of role-play before the question of audience ever enters into the equation.

Born: Valjevo, Serbia, 1954

There are times when little is to be achieved other than to allow the artist to speak for themselves: “I was born in a country that no longer exists. It is good to know one’s own roots and where we come from, but I no longer believe that the concept of ‘home’ or that of ‘belonging’ can be dictated solely by the physical place of birth or by contemporary concepts of ‘nationality.’ The notion of self-identity is a spiritual choice rather than a political ‘given’. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Soviet Union, and the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, I used my work to explore the mechanisms of individual and collective traumas within transitional, post-socialist societies. This resulted in a series of work which explored people’s moral standards and their requisite modification, which allowed universal acceptance of violence towards their fellow citizens. Both the acceptance from the countries who exported war and from those on whose soil that same war was staged. The statement in my work ‘A Precondition’, appears against a background of newspaper columns written in the Croatian language, referring to the fact that our modern political establishments, by influencing public opinion through the media, have promoted the notion of ‘other’ as a modern definition of ‘enemy’. It is through this manufactured concept of ‘difference’ that moral justification is sought for inflicting violence towards fellow human beings. Living and working as an artist in different countries has confirmed for me that acts of oppression are not confined to military conflict and that the resultant trauma of such oppression is universal. To this day, art seems to me the only attempt to deconstruct the daily consent of bearable normalcy. Once one realizes the meaninglessness of one’s own environment, the only remaining choice is to start to learn how to live with that fact. For me art has been and still is a clear modus of existence for an individual human being.”

Born: Franklin, Louisiana, 1982

who knows if the moon's

a balloon,coming out of a keen city

Thus begins one of e.e. cummings poems on the enchanted nature of this world we inhabit. Is it the moon or a balloon, or two cherries stitched to a cloud? Rebecca Rebouché’s paintings inhabit this world with a child’s picturebook inquiry, where effortless objects serve as metaphors for human emotions and ambitions. Tender, hopeful, and whimsical, these signposts are the reminders of a childhood not lost but maintained in the sustenance of human symbols, paintings which offer a panorama almost-archetypal. Striped shorts, ice cream cones, toy sailboats. A white dress, butterflies and umbrellas. All anthropologic objects against peaceful, deeply textured backgrounds of diffused grays, sepias and blues that manage to recall the fields in which Joan Miro’s shape-games played. Though the humanity in Rebouché’s canvases is evident, equally evident is the absence of human faces and figures. We are in a world of things that follow human consciousness as lovingly as The Red Balloon in Albert Lamorisse’s film. Rebouché’s technique involves a patchwork of fabric and paper laid on canvas and layered under paint. The layered elements projecting upwards through the image echoes the quilting technique that is part of Rebouche’s family tradition. She recalls what it was as a child to witness both her mother and grandmother assembling quilts from various fabrics. This tactile element, adding chafe to both background and primary objects, marries process to project, and points towards the resiliency of craft reference in contemporary art. Rebouché’s ultimate affect is lyrical and fanciful and gives whistle to a world where, to complete the e.e. cummings poem…

it's

Spring) and everyone's

in love and flowers pick themselves

Born: Owosso, Michigan, 1978

The temples of celebrity iconography mark our collective landscape. When the gloss of their unassailability breaks down, the skin curdles and the gaping holes of mortality become part of the visage. Aaron Reichert is a painter of mortality. There is nothing seductive in mortality; there is only tenderness. Reichert is interested in the American experience, the harsh roads of its history and consciousness as depicted by the faces of its icons. Reichert spent his formative years in (the aptly named) Hartland, a rural setting outside of Flint, Michigan. His father worked at the GM Truck and Bus Assembly while his mother taught English. This American heartland locale and a spirit of manifest destiny pervade in the choices of Reichert’s subjects. Minimizing color to near extinction on a monotone background, Reichert paints civil war generals, stars of Rockabilly, wrestlers, and Hollywood super-celebs. His figures are immediately recognizable; but while painters from Andy Warhol to Elizabeth Peyton affirm celebrity Pop status, Reichert’s process is one of removal. Both “Grit, Clint Eastwood” and “Up Front, Jack Nicholson” take American toughs, pillars of Hollywood masculinity, and peel back their muscle. If their sexuality is not dislodged, it is now removed from the equation. Masculine beauty has been traded for another sort. Their image (status) remains no less large, but flayed; representation unravels into semi-abstraction with swirls of lines and fissures. These geometric forays, though, are not mere flourishes; they are the mortal details inscribed by time, the hardships of age; they are the immanent failures of flesh, the rotting human meat, the cracks in the veneer that no mortal can stave. There is no irony in Reichert’s work. He is closer to the intent of Ivan Albright, who rotted away the beauty of Dorian Gray, than Gavin Turk, who immortalized Syd Viscious in a glass box. Painters who depicts celebrity also creates a critique of the cult of celebrity, and Reichert is not removed from that conversation. But it is not the conversation that fuels Reichert’s work. While sustaining immortality in iconography, it is Reichert’s technique of sympathy that restores the humanizing quality of mortality.

Born: Pineville, Louisiana, 1967

When Terrence Sanders-Smith was sixteen – having been born in Louisiana and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, having suffered familial physical abuse, having run away from home to endure the harsh lessons of streets and rooftops, having learned to steal, survive drugs and sex and the excruciating uncertainty of his own existence – he met Jean-Michael Basquiat. This was in 1983, while the New York art scene raged in excess and Basquiat, the first black art superstar, tore graffiti from the streets and turned it into high art. Though by 1988 Basquiat would be dead from a drug-overdose, his superstar status, as well as his relentless work-ethic, an outpouring of revolutionary canvases, and especially his self-aggrandizing transformation of lifestyle into a product, into art itself, is all part of Sanders’ inheritance. Like Basquiat, and like Jasper Jones and Henri Matisse before him, Sanders creates melancholic and electrifying images on canvases without center, where shapes, text, symbols and portraiture balance into a conceptual harmony. Within his paintings one is as likely to find the iconic images of our current cultural personalities as a list of African-American heroes of time immemorial: musicians, writers, athletes, and leaders of social justice. These names are Sanders-Smith’s influences and inheritance, and therefore part of his art. Just as he is unhesitant to bring his own personal history into his work, so does his work reflect the culture which cast him. His painting, “August 29th” transforms Hurricane Katrina into a movie poster filled with accusations, direct reporting, and blunt, primitive depictions of leaders and victims alike, all positioned amongst meaningless gloss-magazine reviews. While much post-modern art deals with alienation versus meaning, and prefers the conceptual over the concrete, Sanders contends to deal with solid issues of self, race, social identity, and the scams of our living days. In addition to painted canvases, Sanders-Smith works in photography, film and video. He is the publisher of ArtVoices Magazine, and created Untitled Projects and Jupiter Art Works as a platform for emerging and mid-career artists. He is also the curator of the Saratoga Collection.

Born: Waukesha, Wisconsin, 1954

For more than 40 years, Jim Sohr has been painting distinctly zany images. His figures are more human-esque than markedly human. Strangely round or square heads, popping eyes and long horizontal mouths are some of their characteristic traits. His nude women lounge languid, lazy, wide-hipped and big-busted, as if they’d slipped out of a Matisse and into a 1980’s video game. Sohr acknowledges that he is most impressed with the paintings of Chagall, Picasso, Dali and Walt Disney, and those influences show in his color-scheme. The work is not subtle. Sharply defined lines and a firmness of foreground figures against geometric-patterned backgrounds are some of the defining qualities that have marked the long time-line of Zohr’s work. Even the occasional soft pastel is contained within heavy dark boarders. Zohr wants each individual item to standup and stand-out, to never be lost in minutiae of detail or background. Sohr’s only formal training came from Angola, The Louisiana State Penitentiary where he served half of a seven-year sentence for possession of a minimal amount of marijuana. During his incarceration he managed to get himself assigned to the art room where he could work at any hour he wished with supplies brandished by the state. In 2008 his “Zor Bird,” a loony and child-friendly 15’ steel, fiberglass and aluminum sculpture was installed before the Children’s Resource Library on Napoleon Avenue, funded though a public works initiative from the Arts Council of New Orleans with support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The full breath of Sohr’s career can be experience within the walls of The Jim Sohr Museum of Modern Art, a two-story brick house, located in the Katrina-devastated Chalmette neighborhood, that Sohr has turned into a studio and exhibition space for his vast and playful body of work.

Matt Vis. Born: Quantico, Virginia 1965

Tony Campbell. Born: London, England, 1965

At any New Orleans art event, from White Linen Night to Art for Art’s Sake and certainly the upcoming Prospect.2, be on the lookout for the art performances by Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.), the Gilbert and George style collaboration team of Matt Vis and Tony Campbell. The two impresarios have impersonated bronze statues, handed citations as Art Cops, and fashioned self-photographic recreations of Caravaggios and Van Gogh’s Last Supper. Well-infused with humor while managing to draw parallels between historical and contemporary art , G.A.S. continuously makes conceptual forays with biting social commentary. Their exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, entitled Déjà Vu All Over Again, uses the British Petroleum Oil Spill as their artistic focus. G.A.S. has been a New Orleans based “two-man art team” since 2001, creating contemporary recreations of Classical works in video, photography, performance, sculpture and painting. Campbell and Vis are founding members of Good Children Gallery, the collectively-run artspace. With their fluorescent light sculpture, “OK”, G.A.S. asserts that all in New Orleans is now okedoke. The two-letter dismissive, a quintessentially American idiom with a long history of use that includes once serving as an abbreviation for All Correct, the joke being that neither the O or the K was correct, continues to pare down serious concern and calamity with a catch phrase not uncommon to political spin. If New Orleans is threatened with ecological disaster, drowning in back-room political shenanigans, oil-spattered by corporate abuse, its education system flayed, its streets pot-hole ridden, and its vital visual arts community threatened to be cut-off from government funding, G.A.S. would like to say, in the brightest of lights: It’s OK.

Born 1967 Manhattan, New York

Jameson Stokes was reared in a dysfunctional lower middle class family from Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. He’s a high school drop out and ran away from home at 16 to survive on the streets of New York City. In 1989 he stole a camera from his mother-in-law and began documenting the disenfranchised and rejects of society. ‘I am driven to the less fortunate because I am one of them and they are one of us’. Stokes, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only supervised the making of his photographs with handwritten notes and instructions to the printing procedure at DuArt (NYC) and Professional Color Lab (New Orleans). Stokes continues to create provocative portraits of ordinary and not so ordinary citizens of the world in which we interact with on a daily basis. He isn’t afraid to ask the questions in hopes of exploring a solution to our many problems. “Everyone is relevant and we are all connected, no matter your religion, race, class or gender. I see beauty in what most consider ugly or unattractive. My photographs attempt to strip the layers of guilt, suffering and self hate off the soul until all that’s left is illuminated and beautiful.”

Born: Brooklyn, NY, 1937

Robert Tannen is interested in stones, in big boulders. He is interested in the planet, its composition, and the way humanity has fashioned itself to it, formed communities, living environments, and engaged in an continuous process of scientific/architectural/sociological development. Robert Tannen is an artist who emerged from the New York City art scene of the 1950s and 60s to move to New Orleans in 1969 as part of the gulf coast rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Camille. His artwork incorporates stone, sheet metal, wood, paper, pretty much anything. Of his 50-year retrospective at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, columnist Doug MacCash said that Tannen’s art “is too aggressively intellectual, too defiantly unsellable, too oblivious of current fashion, and too just plain obtuse ever to have gained a wide following.” However it sounds, the intention was complimentary, speaking of the magnitude of ideas behind Tannen’s work. Robert Tannen is an engineer and urban planner. He is responsible for more than $2.5 billion of infrastructure development in Louisiana and Mississippi. He is one of the co-founders of the Contemporary Arts Center. Tannen’s resume and work, which addresses community, environment, preservation, planning, process, and the transient nature of all things, has made him one of New Orleans’ landmark artists. His “Boulder #5” plays with ideas he launched when he transformed Lee Circle into a compass by placing a giant bounder at each magnetic point, marking them N, S, E and W respectively. As Tannen explains, “New Orleans has no boulders nor large rocks except for those brought there to build jetties, streets and other urban structures. Boulder #5 is one of a limited edition of named rocks not naturally found [here], and a reminder of Camille, a category #5 hurricane, the most serious, damaging and highest risk hurricane, more serious, damaging and higher risk than Katrina, and likely to happen some time in the future in this region”

Born: San Francisco, California, 1976

For ten years, Jonathan Traviesa has been taking photographs of his broad circle of acquaintances in their personal settings. He centers them full figure and shoots them in black and white film outside their homes. The rest of the frame is devoted to the environment, their living-spaces and the city of New Orleans which inevitably find its way into every shot in the form of: an abandoned player piano, wrought iron gates, bicycles, stacks of salvaged wood, more musical instruments, chickens, many dogs, costumery, a carnival horse, discarded porcelain bathtubs. And foliage; lots of foliage. It is in the umbrage and undergrowth, in the creeping vines and fantastically huge frondage of the ever-blooming subtropical New Orleans environment that the city makes itself known. For black and white photography, Traviesa’s images are infused with a sense of green and a whiff of the fecund. The series is called Portraits. It has been published as a book by UNO Press, and exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as at the New Orleans artist collective The Front – of which Traviesa is a founding member. In the series the marriage of portrait to environment is enhanced by the personal relations between Traviesa and his subjects. Traviesa assembles the cast. He meets them at their homes, where they are most at ease. The outdoor lighting keeps the illumination simple; no elaborate lighting-kits or diffusing flags to intimidate the subject. Traviesa’s camera is a simple Rolliflext twin-lens passed onto him from his father. The result is a pan-city documentation in the spirit of some of the great photographic surveys, such as Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange’s Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. This is a New Orleans survey, though. The setting is sometimes rag-tag, but the spirit is high. Undisguised are the enthusiasm and joie de vivre, the pleasure Traviesa takes in his subjects, and which his subjects take in their surroundings, their homes and lifestyle and city.

Born: Marrero, Louisiana, 1974

Multimedia artist Dan Tague has made a small industry out of Money. No, not Money, which is a word almost as large as Economy. What Tague has made an industry out of is Currency, the intrinsically valueless commodity which comprises the physical aspect of our store of value. Tague subjects currency, specifically American bills, to an autopsy, eviscerating phrases, words, meanings, and ideas from its (material and aesthetic) legal tender. He plays origami games with the dollar bill, which, as Tague describes, is filled with “detailed decorative engravings, masterful portraits and architectural renderings, and elegant fonts,” all which create the decorative allure Tague then folds and twists into collages of imagery and sometimes direct, accusatory language:

THE END IS NEAR

STATE OF FEAR

TRUST NO ONE

YES WE CAN

are just a few of the phrases Tague summons from currency, which he then turns into giclee on archival rag paper, convincingly enough in texture and appearance to the bills in our pockets. Since these first forays, Tague has continued to make objects of power: tanks, planes, falling bombs and soldiers, out of our currency. In “Destroyer” he stencils a battleship from the etched White House found on the back of a twenty-dollar bill. In “Good and Evil” he creates an actual tree adroit with grass, trunk, bifurcating branches, dangling cherries and dagger-shaped leaves made from dollar bills. Interesting that at the time of the Saratoga Collection, the sequel to the 1987 film Wall Street is being released, revisiting the era of the Me Generation, which epitomized admiration for greed, money, material things, and the drive to take them. Though his pillages into currency have given Tague’s work a political bent, his essence is social commentary and street-conscious confrontation. There is something definitively self-referential into his forays of currency, a reminder that Art itself in one of the great swindles, one which involves the artist, critic, gallery owner, curator, and, most particularly, the collector: the one willing to authenticate the value appointed to a work of art by actually paying for it.

Born: Fresno, California, 1978

While text seems an antithesis to painting, an excursion into verbiage as opposed to the visual langue the medium itself contends, a didactic dose of artists “working in text” since the 1990’s seems almost to herald the social impact of the proliferation of email messages and phone-texts. Artists such as Sean Landers, Peter Davies, Christopher Wool, and Richard Prince all either supplement or rely exclusively on text for the delivering of their message. Paige Valente is likewise interested in text. Working in a large-scale, Valente uses Gaffer’s tape and acrylic on canvas or hard board to sprawl phrases such as “I WANT A REAL ONE” or longer meanderings about people drinking coffee, eating melon, and meeting in bars. The social is Valente’s message, transferring the way we behave, speak and desire to the visual. Always graffiti-like, Valente’s affinity is for words as literal and typographic elements. Sometimes her sentences are laid out straight across canvas while others they are caught in a whirl of high-energy activity, as if sentences were turning on themselves and each other. The playfulness and elusiveness of her text meanings is further infused with such titles as: “Addicktion Conviction,” “I Could Eat A Whole One: 923,” and “Goodie II: With His Beretta Right Inside Me, He Ain't Gon' Shoot.” Communication is Valente’s concern, the means and intent of our outgoing messages, and the manner in which our bevy of daily communiqués are received. Another branch of Valente’s body of work is lush, medium format colored pencil illustrations depicting human and animal personalities in everyday life. Standing amongst photographs, performing on stage, or negotiating urban streets, Valente sets out to make surreal synthesis of the personal and the animal in the collision of everyday settings.

Born: San Fernando Valley, 1975

Miriam Waterman’s series of photographic self-portraits, Verbal Abuse, evolves from a relationship with a verbally abusive partner. The damages incurred, the strikes to her self-worth, as well as the self-personification of the abuses inflicted upon her, serve as catalysts of investigation. Waterman takes the words and accusations once thrown at her and prints them on her body using vintage rubber stamps inherited from her family’s California commercial business. She then photographs herself in black and white and inverts the image into a ghostly pallor, an x-ray of hot and cold contrasts. The words become more than tattoos, more than stamps; they are photographically ingrained, seared into flesh, assuming a physical property. Once the photographs are inverted, there is no re-touching, no manipulations. Physical blemishes become equally proprietary. Waterman is doing the opposite of what Cindy Sherman does when she adorns a costume and sets herself within a narrative. Instead of assuming a character, Waterman accepts the Self appointed to her by her abuser. The psychological portrayal is first self-absorbed before it is projected outward. Waterman also betrays the “show don’t tell” lesson given to every first year creative writing, film and drama student. Waterman immediately “tells” the dramatic content with a direct, printed accusation. The photographic inversion, besides incorporating process, allows Waterman to play with dualities. I am this thing you say, but so am I more. This is my body, as well as its representation. Art is the thing which I do, and possibly what I am. Like Tracy Emin, who addressed her childhood rape and embroidered the names of all her sexual partners inside a tent, inviting viewers to crawl inside, Waterman’s direct incorporation of personal experience brings naked and chaffing intensity to her work.