January 11 - February 2, 2025
Opening reception on Second Saturday, January 11, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.
Programming This Month
Opening night, January 11th
Backyard Film Screening
(weather permitting)
"Le Rabbit Hole"
by Raina Benoit
“Le Rabbit Hole” is a short film, inspired by Alice in Wonderland and the Aquitaine region of France created with the community and culture during the artist's stay in the region. In the spirit of author Marguerite Duras, this film reflects on the poetics of opposites and what does it look like to experience a place and its cultural history? An extension of the artist's previous work, “le Rabbit Hole” inspired by the history and intrinsic rhythm of the place in which it’s created.
View Film
Room 1
Sasha Solodukhina, Hairface, Plastic Mask, Hair Extensions, Fabric Glue, Wood, 13.5 x 27 x 4 inches, 2024
Sasha Solodukhina, Hairface, Plastic Mask, Hair Extensions, Fabric Glue, Wood, 13.5 x 27 x 4 inches, 2024
Sasha Solodukhina, Dead Tourists (Music Video), Digital Video, 4x3, 4 minutes, 2024
Illusions of Grandeur
Sasha Solodukhina
Costume, Masks, Video
Sasha Solodukhina is a fabricator and award-winning filmmaker with a strong pull towards fantastical world-building. Her work centers on inviting new imagination to become kin to lost personal and collective mythology.
In her costuming, she pushes against the conventional boundaries of the body to craft larger-than-life pieces, often out of unconventional materials. This practice extends into her video work, in which she creates surreal worlds using texture, costume, and practical effects to subvert expectations and transport the audience into spaces that are beautiful but fleeting. In both, she builds a language specific to each piece, creating systems of material in order to transcend it.
Sasha’s interest in storytelling was born of a loss: the loss of personal history that comes with immigrating from a place whose collective memory is in dispute through oppression, omission, and revision. Born in Belarus, she often claims to be from Mars: an alien finding familiarity in the extraterrestrial, having to recollect her story through fragmented images, an incomplete chronology, and bodily memory. Her pull towards costuming is an inheritance, a thread picked up from her mother, who picked it up from her own mother, who, likely, picked it up from many more before that.
Illusions of Grandeur is a collection of costumes, videos, and ephemera.
Sasha is a graduate of Wesleyan University and is based in New Orleans.
Sasha Solodukhina, Alchemy, Firewood Sacks, PVC, Fishing Line, Thread, Transparency, Plastic Boning, 40 x 70 x 25 inches, 2024
Sasha Solodukhina, Alchemy II, Silk, Muslin, Organza, Interfacing, Hanger Wire, Plastic Boning, Cotton Thread; Mask - 11”x10”x10”, Collar - 34”x30”x8”, 2024
Sasha Solodukhina, Tell Me a Story (Music Video), Digital Video + Stop Motion, 4x3, 4 minutes, 2020
Room 2
Younger Than I Was Before
Déja M. Jones, Kerry “rexroth” Santa Cruze, Niani Mills, and Reine Morris
Multimedia Installation: collage, paintings, video, sculpture, and photography
In July 2024, Living School, an alternative values high school in New Orleans East that prioritized individual student health outcomes over grades and test scores, sadly closed its doors for good. Among its last graduating classes were talented artists Kerry “rexroth” Santa Cruze, Niani Mills, and Reine Morris, who share a deep connection to this cherished community. With a profound understanding of loss, mourning, and hope, and uncertainty they present “Younger Than I Was Before,” an immersive artistic reflection on their childhoods—what they were, what they weren't, and the hopes they held for what could have been. This heartfelt project invites viewers to join them on a journey of introspection and emotional exploration. It is created in collaboration with Déja Jones, multimedia artist, organizer, and Youth Specialist with the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board, who brings their unique perspective and expertise to the conversation through collaboration and creation.
Room 3
E Marshall, April/May, Mixed Media on Paper, 7 x 8 inches, 2024.
E Marshall, Drawing of the Sky (detail), Mixed Media, Variable dimensions, 2018- 2025.
Stars In Unfortunate Alignment
E Marshall
Drawing, Mixed Media
This is the third installment of an ongoing attempt to draw the sky. The first two installments of the drawing were in 2018 and 2020. With each new installment the drawing grows in size. Also on view will be new works on paper made in the last few months of 2024. Calendars, star signs, symbols, synchronicity, searching for meaning and masking.
E Marshall lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. They spent their childhood in the Midwest and moved to New Orleans in 2012. They work across several mediums including drawing, painting, sewing and installations. Their work explores ideas of mental space-scapes and parallel universes using bold imagery and lots of color. Loves to scribble.
Room 4
Raina Benoit, Gilded Cloud I, wood, acrylic paint, gold, 2025
Detail, Raina Benoit, Gilded Cloud I, wood, acrylic paint, gold, 2025
Ordinary Oracles
Raina Benoit
Mixed Media
“Ordinary Oracles”, is a combination of small things that make me feel grounded and connected to Louisiana. These little things gain strength and become impregnated with meaning when paid attention to: like the clouds, the swamp, wrought iron porches, the Spanish moss, the crawfish castles, and statue virgin Marys that adorn front lawns like good luck charms. In the era of hyper reality A.I and hyper masculinity where billionaires shoot their asses into new colonial frontier space, this exhibition is an exploration of an inverted hierarchy where the human body is a mere ingredient to its surroundings rather than a cultivator.
Raised in Cajun country, Raina Benoit’s experience with cultural narrative evoked by a place is well versed. Whether it is through painting, drawing, animation, sound, or site-sensitive projects, her work investigates materials and the psychology of place through a painter’s lens. After living and working in New York City she continued her studies in France, lived and researched along the U.S Southeast’s coastline observing the effects of tourism on the coasts and wildlife. She lived for seven years with her family creating “The Creative Refuge”, an environmental artist project space, between Louisiana and France. Raina received her BA from Louisiana State University in Liberal Arts and her MFA at the University of Arizona. She is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and naturalist based in New Orleans.