GiveNOLA Day 2024
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Early Giving Has Begun!
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GiveNOLA Day 2024 〰️ Early Giving Has Begun! 〰️
April 13 - May 5, 2024
Opening reception on Second Saturday, April 13, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.
Programming This Month:
Sunday, May 5
2pm
ARTIST TALKS
featuring
Diane Appaix-Castro, Abismo
Summer White, Current Vessel
Ulrika Matthiessen and Brantley Ellzey, Double Major
Room 1
Diane Appaix-Castro, Abismo, Experiential Installation, 12 x 8 x 8 feet, 2024.
Abismo
Diane Appaix-Castro
My work aims to immerse viewers in situations challenging the limits of human knowledge and understanding. Through sensory manipulation and questioning established ideas, particularly those rooted in Western scientific methods, I create immersive experiences that encourage a suspension of disbelief. By accessing a more open and malleable part of the viewer's mind, I seek to foster appreciation for humanity, the world, and the universe, prompting a reconsideration of our self-assigned benchmark.
I believe in the viewer being an active part of the work. I theorize that viewership is a 3-dimensional and sculptural relationship between the viewer and the work that lingers a while after the interaction is completed. I strive to create situations that fuel that lingering.
In the studio, I experiment with unconventional materials, drawing on a diverse educational and vocational background. Material exploration is integral to developing conceptual themes, often enhanced by projection and audio elements for a fully immersive experience.
My research spans marine biology, astronomy, various sciences, religious beliefs, philosophy, and the current socio-environmental and political climate. These diverse studies serve as tools for human understanding and exploration. Growing up amidst multiple cultures and adapting daily to different societal norms, I learned to embrace opposing truths. This mindset, coupled with extensive travel experiences, allows me to empathize with diverse perspectives, fostering an acceptance of the unknown. My art practice and mission revolve around acknowledging and embracing the uncharted, propelled by a lifelong commitment to questioning convention and embracing simultaneous opposing truths.
Diane Appaix-Castro is a French and Spanish sculptor and experiential installation artist born in Paris, France, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is currently based in New Orleans, Louisiana since 2019. Diane has an MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University and a BFA from Suffolk University and has exhibited work in the South, the Midwest, and the Northeast of the US. Diane has been in residence with Studio North by Moskow Linn Architects, the Southern Heat Exchange, and is currently in a 14-week residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Diane is the recipient of the Emergency Grant to fund a project from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the School of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Summer Research and Write-Up Fellowship Grant, and was awarded first place in DIY Art for the show titled Reconnecting in Quarantine at Tulane Hillel. She is a member of the artist collective, The Front and has a studio at Camp Street Studios. Aspects of Diane’s practice involve researching cross-cultural scientific and philosophical thinking, marine biology, and outer space to expand her vision of the possible and wonder what may lie beyond the limits of our perception.
Room 2
Summer White, Vernal Angel (detail), Acrylic on Wood Panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2024
Summer White, The Weeping Angel (detail), Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 40 inches, 2024
Summer White, The Weeping Angel (detail), Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 40 inches, 2024
Summer White, Protection (detail), Acrylic on Wood Panel, 18 x 36 inches, 2024
Current Vessel
Summer White
Current Vessel is a pathway from the brutal dreaming of winter into the budding mysteries of spring. A winding path of fluid and fire that traverses through the celestial, the elemental, the flesh. Angels weep, angels weave, angels experience the eroticism of the earth. A spontaneous alchemy of grief, spirit, starlight, and desire transmutes ether and matter into something vernal.
Summer White is a painter and maker in New Orleans. Her work is informed by continuous study of archetypes, Victorian flower language, mythology, magic, nature, and folklore. She uses the poetry of figures and flowers, creatures and patterns, objects and fruit to embellish the personification of intuition, exalt animism, and reclaim and amplify sensual agency in the body.
Summer completed a 5 month artist residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2022. She became a member of The Front in 2023. In addition to painting, she does photography and set design.
Rooms 3 + 4
Brantley Ellzey and Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of History, Mixed Media, rolled vintage academic text, acrylic paint, 2024.
Brantley Ellzey and Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of Medicine, Mixed Media, rolled vintage academic text, acrylic paint, 2024.
Brantley Ellzey and Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of Law, Mixed Media, rolled vintage academic text, acrylic paint, 2024.
Double Major
Ulrika Matthiessen and Brantley Ellzey
Ulrika Matthiessen and Brantley Ellzey met in 1981 when both were in a summer program for newly-declared majors in the architecture school at Tulane. It was an intense three months that forged a friendship that has grown and inspired the duo for over forty years.
Double Major is the first collaboration between these two friends. Ellzey’s work explores pop culture and media primarily by manipulating rolled paper, while Matthiessen focuses on pushing the limits of fantasy and abstraction of the human figure through painting and sculpture.
Double Major takes as its theme classical academia and the contradictions inherent in a traditional education juxtaposed with an evolving tech-centered world. Vintage media that inform each featured discipline (music, law, medicine, geography and history) are rolled, assembled and combined with sculptural and painted elements to express the various themes. Is education as we’ve come to know and accept it outdated in a world where we carry around the accumulated knowledge of mankind on a device in our pockets?
Ulrika Matthiessen is a visual artist living and working in New Orleans, LA. She was born in Sweden and grew up in Mississippi during the 1960s and 1970s. Moving between the culturally disparate environments of her Nordic homeland and the Deep South greatly impacted her artistic sensibility, leading to an intense observation of people and their environment.
Matthiessen earned degrees in Fine Arts and Architecture from Tulane University, and she applies these two practices to the design process in her work. Her paintings layer and juxtapose multiple images and materials, both precise and architectonic, as well as fluid and organic.
Her work is in the art collections of Xavier University and the Whitney Plantation Museum.
Brantley Ellzey, born and raised in Osceola, Arkansas, is a Tulane University alumnus with a BA in Theater and a MA in Architecture. Ellzey has spent his career blurring the lines between art and architecture, craft and design. His multi-disciplinary practice is characterized by a thoughtful approach to subject, painstaking research, exacting precision, and rigorous attention to detail. He has completed design projects throughout the US. His visual art has been exhibited in solo and group shows and is in private and corporate collections including the Gunlocke Corporation, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the National Civil Rights Museum. Ellzey lives in Memphis and maintains a studio and gallery space on the resurging Summer Avenue in the Highland Heights area of the city.