August 12 - September 3, 2023

Opening reception on Second Saturday, August 12, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.

Programming This Month:

Room 1

Sarah VanDermeer, Resident of the Static Machine, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, 2022.
Sarah VanDermeer, The Parts You See, oil on wood 18 x 18 inches, 2022.
Sarah VanDermeer, Collecting Unconscious, oil on wood, 18 x 25 inches, 2023.
Sarah VanDermeer, They Appear First in the Form of Language, oil on canvas 36 x 28 inches, 2023.
Sarah VanDermeer, Sparknoticing, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 inches, 2023.
Sarah VanDermeer, After the Storm, oil on board, 24 x 18 inches, 2022.
Sarah VanDermeer, Growing, oil on wood, 24 x 18 inches, 2023.

Hiding Places
Sarah VanDermeer

‘Hiding Places’ is a collection of paintings I’ve been inhabiting over the past two years. I work almost exclusively from imagination, preferring to let the dislocated nature of memory guide my work. Connected through a personal language of color, symbol, metaphor and trope, these paintings are representations of mental landscapes and dreams. I like to paint pathways and portals into my work, inviting the viewer to access different nooks of empathy, trepidation, or calm. I often find myself thinking about how cracks in walls can make a person feel; what kinds of secrets could be hidden behind loose bricks or how landscape impacts the body. Hiding Places is an opportunity to commune with unseen forces – all is not as it seems and things may act upon each other with a secret sympathy. 

Sarah VanDerMeer is a New Orleans based artist and sculptor. Her primary medium is painting, although she has been collaborating with both film and theater directors to create evocative worlds using her background in large-scale installation, puppetry, and animation. She received an undergraduate degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012 and has since transitioned to painting, attracted to the world building available through the medium. She is most moved by spaces that evoke a magnitude and strangeness that is otherworldly – spaces that remind us of our diminutive place in nature.

@sarah.vandermeer 

Room 2

Augustus Hoffman, Adam and Eve, Flashe and Acrylic on Panel, 5 x 7 inches, 2023.
Augustus Hoffman, Pastoral Concert, styrofoam, wood, fabric, wire, paint, 14 x 8 x 10 inches, 2023.
Augustus Hoffman, The Entombment, Flashe and Acrylic on Panel, 8 x 6 inches, 2023.
Augustus Hoffman, The Night Shade, Flashe and Acrylic on Panel, 7 x 5 inches, 2023.

Call and Response
Augustus Hoffman

I am a painter and sculptor who is  primarily concerned with the  intersection of observation and perception. I believe that to make art is to be in dialogue: in dialogue with the issues that make up our current world but also in dialogue with the artists and artworks that establish our own understanding of what it is to create in the first place. I’m currently working on a series of sculptures and paintings that are based on visual motifs often found in the western canon. I’m interested in re-examining  my favorite paintings from the past such as a Jean Corot landscape or one of  Titian's  mythological scenes. In re-examining these paintings, I hope to both draw attention to the excitement I experience through engaging  this work while also marking a clear deviation away from it.  

My process is as follows: I make sculptures based on specific historical paintings primarily using found material such as cardboard, wood, moss,  fringe, styrofoam, and paint. In the process of making these forms, I discover that I both get closer to the original work of art through my investigation but also further away from it as my own aesthetic preferences and sensibilities come into play.  Once these works are finished I then create a painting based on the completed sculpture. My practice feels like a dimented form of telephone where certain phrases and utterances become amplified and distorted while other ones entirely disappear. This, in a sense, mimics my understanding of the story of art. 

The more tenuous the throughline between the original work of art, my sculpture, and then my own painting is, the more excited I become.   

Augustus Hoffman is an artist who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Augustus is a painter and sculptor who is concerned with the intersection of perception and observation. He has studied at Bard College, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the New York Studio School. He has taught at Bard Early College, The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, and The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Augustus has shown his work all over the country most notably in New York City, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He was recently an artist in residence at the Mount Gretna School of Art and is currently a member of the artist collective The Front in New Orleans. 

www.augustushoffman.com
@augustushoffmanartwork

Room 3

Danielle Fauth, Short Term/Long Distance, sheathing plywood, copper, concrete sand, dims. variable, 2022.
Danielle Fauth, Short Term/Long Distance, sheathing plywood, copper, concrete sand, dims. variable, 2022.
Danielle Fauth, The Truck Smells Like Sunblock (Year Long Summer), porcelain, steel, NY tall grass, dimensions variable, 2022.
Danielle Fauth, Short Term/Long Distance, sheathing plywood, copper, concrete sand, dims. variable, 2022.

Short Term / Long Distance
Danielle Fauth

The pieces in this exhibition are extracted from an older body of work in which materials like sand, copper, porcelain, wood, and grass compose a landscape that unfolds time as place. “Short Term / Long Distance” includes pieces that revolve around an oyster shell I collected some years ago from home in New York. This installation, though centered around a personal effect, extends beyond nostalgia. It focuses on tying together senses of big and little time: Oyster shells are keepers of colossal time, but only through the hundreds of individual bands in their surface that log all sorts of environmental circumstances to compose a larger narrative. That being said, their frequency renders them a sort of landmark that helps me define home.

“Short Term / Long Distance” is not meant to be a series of complex digital experiments and outputs - but rather a landscape in which I simply explore line as a signifier of time and place in geological, digital, and psychological processes. In asking digital tools to interpret and express an organic, irregular form on their fixed axes, I am warmed by the similarities the process bears to human functions like memory recall. Just as we do, machines ruminate on a form to both build and excavate their own cognitive map; something abstracted from observable reality but familiar in feeling.

Danielle Fauth is an interdisciplinary sculptor born and raised in Long Island, New York. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University in 2022. Using found objects and construction materials as her primary mediums, she draws on personal experiences to constellate a broader dialogue around poetics of material, place, and identity. Fauth was a 2022 RedLine CAC Satellite Studio Artist in Denver, Colorado, a 2023 Volland Foundation Artist in Residence, and currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

@_system.processing
www.dfsculpture.com

Room 4

GROWING IN BITS
Hayley Sam Jensen

The harsh realities surrounding our environment and our plastic pollution are often too colossal to grapple with on a day to day basis. However, daily interaction with both the local environment and plastic consumption is a given for almost anyone. In this collection of work, I try to piece together how building a relationship with plants through gardening helps me find peace and play during environmental anxiety and looming doom. Additionally, through my scrap material collection from local New Orleans friends, florists, farmers, and personal use, I’ve found ways to use bits and swaths of plastic that would have otherwise gone to landfills. Through this experiment of collecting plastics for the past few years, I’ve faced the fact that I cannot extract myself from the ever present and all too consuming problem of waste. I can use bits and pieces in my practice to help ease my mind, and I can garden as often and as boldly as I can while facing environmental catastrophe. These two actions on their own make minuscule impacts overall on the issues at hand, but they collide in this work and offer me a source of service and care. 

Hayley Sam Jensen is a New Orleans based visual artist, gardener, and teacher. Originally from the New Orleans area, Jensen received her BFA in Studio Art from LSU and later went on to receive her MFA in Studio Art from San Francisco Art Institute. Since returning to New Orleans, she has worked as a painter for film productions, event fabrication, window displays, and murals. Jensen teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, and she additionally works with local farms (Baby T-Rex Farm and Cicada Calling Farm), florists, and gardeners in the New Orleans area.

@haysamjensen
hayleysamanthajensen.com
hayleyjensen.art@gmail.com