August 10- September 8, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 10th --- 6-10pm
Closing Artist Talk + BBQ + DJ: Saturday, September 7th --- 3-6pm
Room 1:
Nonney Oddlokken
Flowers: The Moment that We Live
"He showed me circles. Circles of Life. And then he showed me a flower. A plant has a circle. A seed becomes a plant that has a flower that transforms into a fruit. The fruit drops. There's another seed. The seed grows again. This is a circle. The Flower Is The Moment That We Live... the most beautiful moment of the circle.”
- Alex Atala, Brazilian Chef.
Just as I was starting to create work for this show. We had two unexpected and tragic deaths of family friends, just two weeks apart. This work is a tribute to the beauty in life.
Nonney Oddlokken is a native to New Orleans, but had lived and studied art in Europe for many years. She received her BFA at Strykejernet Fine Arts Academy in Oslo, Norway. Then in 2001, she returned back to the University of New Orleans to further her interest in Women’s Studies. Her art is very narrative, symbolic and depicts the indigenous plants, animals, and folklore found in Southern Louisiana. She currently lives in St Charles Parish with her husband, two children, three dogs and a pond of goldfish that she has named after friends.
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Room 2:
Kelly A. Mueller
Survival Paradoxically Involves Surrender
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
– John Muir
Nothing in nature exists in isolation; everything is part of a larger complex, universal system. Author/Biologist David George Haskell writes, “Survival paradoxically involves surrender, giving up the self in union with its allies. We’re all- trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria- pluralities. Life is embodied network…where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves, but in the dissolution of the self… Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life… so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory.”
Kelly’s current studio work concentrates primarily on the tenuous space between natural law and the high-order organization (and accompanying habits) of human existence. Pulling from systems and behaviors found in nature, her painted works orchestrate narrative collages with the assistance of a digital projector, allowing bits of “projected chatter”: email snippets, articles, podcast headlines, to intermingle with her drawing. These projected images rise and fall in woven layers of visual and physical texture, acting as a form of hand-painted printmaking, speaking both to the artist’s choice and to the higher-order distraction we’ve created in an imagined environment we’ve separated from the natural world.
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
–Herman Melville
Originally from Chicago, Kelly teaches art at Lusher Charter High School and lives in Mid-City, New Orleans. Often large and textural, her paintings and drawings center on the tension between natural forces and systems, and the human tendency to subvert these systems. She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University and is currently a member of The Front Gallery in New Orleans, and Baton Rouge Gallery, LA. She attends artist residencies whenever possible outside of her teaching, including such places as Hambidge, GA; Stone House, CA; Philadelphia Art Hotel, Dorland Mountain Art Colony, and a research trip to the Amazon Rainforest as a Surdna Fellow. Hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing, and being with her favorite people bring her great joy.
www.kellyannemueller.com
Rooms 3 & 4:
SPACE EXPLORERS / SPACE INVADERS
Jessie Vogel
Peter Hoffman
Sylvia Santamaria
Angel Perdomo
Patrick Coll
Curated by Kevin Baer
Space Explorers / Space Invaders is a group exhibition responding to ideas of outer space, alien life and interstellar contact. Artists were asked to reflect upon, as recent discoveries seem to tell us, the near certainty of life on other planets. I was thinking about an intergalactic conversation - Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Voyager space probes carrying a golden record etched with sounds, music and messages from Earth - including how to find us.
The show features a mixture of approaches - sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking and 3-D animation. Artistic responses range from strange, to funny, to optimistic. Some deal with a darker side – alien invaders come to conquer our planet or looking toward a future where the human race must flee to Mars because we have exhausted Earth’s resources. What form might alien life take? Will life from other planets ultimately be benevolent or violent? What about us?
