August 12- September 3, 2017

Room 1:

Painters Painting Painters
Shuffle

Ten New Orleans based artists hold monthly meetings in which they gather reference material for a portrait over drinks and friendship. At each meeting a different member of the group is photographed or sketched at his/her house. At the following meeting each member brings their finished portrait(s) and the process has continued until all ten members have had their likeness painted. Painters Painting Painters aims to create a dialogue about painting, artistic process, and most importantly, community. 

Kevin Brisco Jr., Aaron Collier, Natori Green, Peter Hoffman, Jeremy Jones, Erica Lambertson, Kaori Maeyama, Patch Somerville, Maddie Stratton, and John Isiah Walton

This is the group’s second exhibition, learn more about the group and their first exhibition here:

http://pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2017/salon-style-painters-painting-painters-at-nocca

Room 2:

Lars Anderson, Andy Mauery, and Bonnie Maygarden
COORDINATION

Lars Anderson, Andy Mauery, and Bonnie Maygarden use pattern extensively in their work. Coordination takes a closer look at the different types of visual and conceptual organization paramount to each of the artist's processes.

Lars Anderson

The Access series, excerpted here, began life as the product of failure.  I approached various industrial sites, intending to photograph inside the perimeter, and often found myself stymied by privacy fences. Over time, I discovered that working from outside created visual possibilities and insights that might have gone unnoticed had access been gained. The fences act as filters, mediating the reality coming to us from the other side.

In these photographs, viewers observe interesting optical effects.  They see different things, depending on where they stand.  It’s fascinating to watch people interact with the images.  They get closer, they step back, they move left and right, trying to “figure it out”.  Sometimes, they even look at them edge-on, to see if any of the elements have been glued on.  So, this work rewards the second, third, and – I hope – the 50th look.

These two phenomena, filtered reality and shifting focus, have become to me metaphors for the American social situation.  The Access series emerged from 2014 to 2017, and in parallel, our media landscape and socio-political scene continued to evolve.  Seeking knowledge about the workings of our society is a challenging task.    Whatever sources we choose filter and mediate reality, just as these fences do.  Since gathering and reporting information are human endeavors, that process of mediation and filtration is inherent in their nature.

What we see in these images, and in the world, depends to some extent on where we stand.  I think we’d all like to believe that the opposite is true:  that where we stand – on any topic from monetary policy to the merits of our favorite sports team – depends on what we see.  However, in our natural state, we’re not that objective.  So, this work calls us to action:  stand in a different place, if only for a moment.

Lars Anderson was born and raised in Iowa.  As a child, he sketched imaginary industrial landscapes and drafted architectural plans for buildings that would never exist.  He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 2006 and began photographing the industrial realms of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys in 2007.  His current work focuses on the unexpected interestingness found in both abandoned and active manufacturing sites.  His work has been the subject of several solo exhibits, and has been included in numerous group shows, as well as an award-winning publication.

www.larsandersonimages.com

Andy Mauery

These works are from my series, “devolve,” my ode to the non-human species that we can’t seem to stop ourselves from destroying, and a sideways look at how we keep ourselves at the center of this equation. To devolve is to pass on rights, responsibilities, and/or powers, from one person or entity to another.  As a verb, it also suggests degeneration, possibly an entropic unmaking. “devolve” explores, in a slightly playful fashion, our willingness to give up order and stewardship in favor of a more chaotic way of being, one that seems to have more immediate gains for only a tiny percent of the human world population.

I focus on endangered and protected species, and often work with hair because it is deeply personal, and at the same time a shared mammalian attribute.  Its central role here feels a bit obsessive, and fetishistic, and right. Many of the works, most obviously the “orifice” pieces, are mandalas in composition and in the ritual sense: they represent the effort to reunify the self.  The self, in this instance, is a self not separate from its natural, biological world. The work is a mix of realistic, recognizable imagery with some mythic/fairytale references, poking a bit at our insistence on overlooking the reality we see before us in favor of the stories we use to comfort ourselves and allow us to perpetuate more bad decisions.

“devolve” has been supported by a grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust.

Andy Mauery is a Maine-based visual artist whose objects and installations have appeared in national and international exhibitions in numerous venues, with solo shows and collaborations at the Chaves de la Rosa Cultural Complex (Peru), MOBIUS in Boston, SPACES gallery in Cleveland, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Other shows include CHROMA: Red Issue at Safehouse 1 in London, T’ART (London), and ECO Art at Gallery 1313 in Toronto. She has received numerous grants and awards, including an A.R.T. Fund Individual Award from Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation in 2016, a Good Idea grant from the Maine Arts Commission in 2013, and an individual fellowship from The American-Scandinavian Foundation. She has been an artist in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Vermont Studio Center, the Erik Nyholm Fondet in Denmark, and Tesuque Glassworks. 

Originally from Pennsylvania, she has taught at The University of Maine since 2000.

www.andymauery.com

Bonnie Maygarden

I am interested in making works that are informed by and react to a culture defined by a digital experience. My work references familiar technology-created images, such as photography, xrays, or photoshop filters, yet are created only using the meticulous illusion of paint. Through referencing the digital image I am able to make paintings that walk the line between something and nothing, that both play to our expectations of the disposable contemporary image and the valued tradition of the handmade. 

Bonnie Maygarden was born in 1987 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She attended Pratt Institute, where she received her Bachelor's of Fine Arts in 2010. Maygarden returned to New Orleans to attend Tulane University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in 2014. Maygarden has exhibited in the US and abroad, including exhibitions at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Université Lumière in Lyon, France. Her work has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings and Artforum. Maygarden lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

http://bonniemaygarden.com/

Rooms 3 & 4:

Jennifer Bock-Nekson, Kelly A. Mueller, Amy Sacksteder
Rare Earth

Paintings and works on paper: a three woman show responding to the intricacies of space, place, and environment.

Jennifer Bock-Nelson

Jennifer Bock-Nelson was born in Chicago (1978) but spent most of her early years in Michigan. She earned her BA in art at Houghton College, located in western New York, and graduated with her MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2004. She presently resides in Quincy, Illinois with her husband and two sons.

I am interested in particularity. Through details, my work records a singular moment. I look for unexpected compositions within nature through motion, refraction, alternative points of view or microscopic scale. The paintings are photo-realistic in that they rely upon a photograph to suspend time for prolonged examination. Magnifying to abstraction, I find the dual tasks of visually deconstructing and physically reconstructing an image in paint to be immensely satisfying. The result is a stylized version of reality that is pieced together from interlocking fragments of shape and color.

http://bock-nelson.com/

Kelly A. Mueller

Originally from Chicago, Kelly now teaches art at Lusher Charter High School and lives in Mid-City, New Orleans. 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 escapes to 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.

“There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision.  They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts.  They are merely trying to occur; they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them.  And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization.”

                                                                                      --- Bruno Schultz

I like to work in the tenuous space between natural law and the high-order organization and accompanying habit of human existence. Pulling from systems and behaviors I find in nature, I orchestrate painted narrative collages with the assistance of a digital projector. Mindful of my own distraction as I work, I allow bits of news from the local paper to show through the surface, and record bits of “projected chatter”: email snippets, articles, podcast headlines, and Facebook posts, allowing them to weave in and out of the surrounding imagery.

www.kellyamueller.com

Amy Sacksteder

Amy Sacksteder received her BA in English from the University of Dayton in 2001 and her MFA in painting from Northern Illinois University in 2004. Sacksteder lives and works in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she is an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at Eastern Michigan University.

My paintings, drawings, and installations embody the inability to convey the significance of an event or the impact of a place. Therefore I think the actual content of the work resides in the attempt, the trying—often futilely—to communicate meaning. The work draws upon the traditions of landscape painting and natural science illustration, and incorporates the visual language of maps, diagrams, and artifacts, as a way of exploring our connection—many times via objects—to specific places and occurrences. Compelled by the variety of ideas about and human interactions with the land and landscape, I begin to investigate personal and universal significance of place.

In installations, I’m most interested in the ways in which the paintings, drawings on paper, their silver-leafed cut-outs, painted flora, reflective surfaces, and light can all interact and create a larger conversation between object and atmosphere, between the taken and the left. As humans generally conflate places, experiences, even dreams in our memories, with my installations I’m hoping to create spaces in which such jumbled significance is a felt presence.

www.amysacksteder.com

Amy Sacksteder, The Other Side of Light, silver leaf on hand cut Rives BFK, installation dimensions variable (approx. 70" x 60"), 2017