December 9, 2017- January 7, 2018

Opening reception Saturday December 9th, 6-10pm

Clickbait is an exhibition of photographic media that expands - and slows down - the idea of sensationalism and controversy within our digital age. The works culled from 14 different lens-based artists from across the country explore how sensationalism interacts with photography, how certain content can exploit the "curiosity gap" that exists when a viewer is presented with some information but not all, and how different parts of a thing can be emphasized or hidden to increase the "scandalousness" or lure of its appearance regardless of its true content.  

Featuring:

Allison Beondé
Carly Sioux
Cynthia Scott
Dane Hansen
Devin Lunsford
Janna Ireland
Justine Tobiasz
Kevin Baer
Lindsay Metivier
Meg Griffiths
Robyn LeRoy-Evans
Ryn Wilson
Tara Wray
Vanessa Centeno

https://photonola.org/

https://www.prospectneworleans.org/exhibition-description/

Allison Beondé

Carly Sioux

Carly Sioux is a provocateur with a camera, boldly exploring ways that candid images can liberate us from the mundane surface of the photographic into a place where the everyday is condensed, revered, even aggrandized. Armed with the simplest point-and-shoot cameras, Carly creates deftly composed photographic treasures, which capture unrepeatable moments of human intimacy and spontaneity. These moments, showcased as isolated images, evoke the essence of performance and embrace the endless dynamic dance between humans and their environment.

Carly’s photographs and photo essays have been featured in numerous publications, including N.Y. Magazine, Huffington Post, NY Press, Timeout, Travel + Leisure, Bust, The Printed Blog, and Bass Notes. While living in New York City, Carly was a regular contributor for Impose Magazine and the founder of Social Realist and Le Wild Bore. Carly has recently relocated to New Orleans and continues to be a tireless, thought-provoking performer, blogger and Instagram broadcaster.

Most recently Carly Sioux’s work explores the exhibitionism and vanity of Selfie culture. Through the classical motif of Self Portraiture, Carly incorporates 35mm film stills, video art, performance and ritual in her examination of “Self.”  By means of integrating mysticism and femininity into her narrative, Carly seeks to highlight and celebrate those ideas rather than to merely promote vanity.

Cynthia Scott

Cynthia Scott followed a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design with stints as a singer (Red Flame/Virgin 10 Records) and actress (Aliens) in New York, London and Los Angeles – eventually completing the circle by establishing a home and art studio in New Orleans.  She received her MFA in Studio Art from Tulane University in 2008. 

Scott is the recipient of several public art commissions, an Artist Fellowship, and numerous grants from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation, the Contemporary Arts Center’s SweetArts Fund, and Transforma Projects. She has exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Providence, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, New Orleans, Alexandria (LA), Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Nashville, and cities in Alabama, Texas, South Carolina and California. From 2009 to 2011 she established and coordinated Current:NOLA, a discussion group/think tank of artists and writers engaged in raising the national and international profile of contemporary New Orleans visual art through dialogue, promotion, and critical writing.

Current studio practice includes both large installations and smaller sculptural objects with sociopolitical themes, utilizing recycled materials, photography, and fabrication.  Scott was one of the founder members of Staple Goods gallery collective and is now pleased to be a member of The Front.

Although I have primarily identified as a sculptor, recently I realized that photography has been a major component of my practice, at times forming its own parallel practice. For years I told myself I was capturing images as notes for sculpture, until the day I realized I couldn't improve upon those images and they became the ongoing photo series Sculptures I Wish I Had Made. I also incorporate photo transfer techniques learned while working as a textile designer into some of my three dimensional pieces.

Neoflora 5, the work in this exhibition, resulted from a visit to Los Angeles and my rediscovery of the many weird and wonderful succulent gardens that thrive so well in the desert climate. The plants looked so otherworldly that I decided to exaggerate their strangeness by reversing the palettes. The resulting outer spaceness of them became an alternate reality garden that exists only in the imagination. This piece is taken from my own garden, which will provide more fodder for space exploration as the seasons change.

Dane Hansen

No Gun

Groucho points at Chico, in disguise as Groucho.  It’s a fake mirror on a real screen, which is now a figurative depiction on paper.  The gun only appears if you want it to.  There was never one in the movie.  

The photo was taken inside my grandfather’s house.  He is dead.  The house was sold.  I know it must have been remodeled, but I can’t picture it any other way.  I can only see that there is a brown stain on the ceiling and antlers in the basement.  There is always a brown stain on the ceiling and antlers in the basement.  Whoever lives there now is an imposter.  The only face I can give them is Groucho Marx.  

Duck Soup is playing on the TV.  The Marx brothers are double crossing each other while destroying a nation.  They will forgive each other, and win the war.  Everyone is laughing, singing, and dancing.

Devin Lunsford

Janna Ireland

Janna Ireland was born in Philadelphia in 1985. She holds an MFA in Photography from UCLA and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU. Ireland is the 2013 recipient of the Snider Prize, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She lives in South Pasadena, California.

My work revolves around a series of consistent preoccupations—family and familial sites, blackness, and upward mobility. I often return to the home in my work: home as a house; home as a community; the feeling of being at home versus the feeling of being an outsider. Through my portraits, I examine the politics of self-representation, agency, and aspiration.

Justine Tobiasz

Justine Tobiasz (b.1988) is a photographer and archivist based in Chicago, Illinois. She is interested in facts and fictions in the historical narratives presented in audio-visual archives, and using those media aesthetics to examine the present. She is currently serving as the photograph archivist for the Chicago Tribune.

Looking at ethnically mixed first-generation immigrant settled neighborhoods in the Great Lakes region, the photographic essay Shut Open shows a universe that is somewhere in between nations.

Kevin Baer

Kevin Baer was born in Denver, Colorado to an architect father and sculptor mother.  He attended college in California, earning his bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University.  Graduate study brought him to Louisiana where he achieved his MFA at the University of New Orleans.  The artist currently lives, teaches and makes artwork in New Orleans with his girlfriend and his large cat.

The photograph is the result of a self-imposed artist residency I spent at my family’s cabin in the mountains just outside of Bailey, Colorado this past summer.  The piece is a direct response to an experience I had as a child while up at the cabin.  My family would often hike among the aspen groves and small valleys of the surrounding area and one time we happened across a fresh deer carcass.  I believe I was about eight years old at the time.  The deer had been partially eaten by predators.  I was fascinated by the body of the dead deer.  My parents said they recall us going up to the cabin often and I would always ask to return to the spot and observe the remains.  The carcass would be more deteriorated and strewn about by scavengers as time went on.  I was struck by the idea that even after death, the animal’s body was a shifting, changing thing.  A very clear emblem of the interconnectedness of life and death.

I have often thought about that deer carcass in relation to my artistic practice and decided to respond while up at the family cabin this last summer.  I took some photographs at the spot where the dead deer had lain, to the best of my memory.  Removing my clothes and laying in the grass, the concept was to show a connection to the deer carcass from many years ago by presenting my natural body at rest in that place.  While hiking the surrounding hills, I found a great range of deer bones – many leg bones as well as shoulder blades and even a lower jaw bone.  The idea is to express a sense of interconnectedness by presenting a few of the found deer bones installed in the corresponding location within the image of my human body.  The piece also speaks to the gap between visual information and understanding as a re-creation or re-interpretation of a significant lived memory, placing myself – the initial observer – as the object of observation.

My art is a means for investigating the passage of time, the decay of physical things, and the truth of mortality.  I explore these concepts through process-oriented artworks that emphasize ritual and material.  The process is communicated with the creation of relics, often existing as photographs, works on paper, or the remains of degenerated sculptures.  These relics bear witness to the process.

I focus on themes of temporal change and death because they remain central to our metaphysical and physical existence.  Through my work I aim to pay homage to death while offering viewers an experience of being “present”, aware of our existence in time and mindful of life’s temporal nature.  My intention is to evoke a recognition of mortality giving rise to feelings of gratitude and humility.

Lindsay Metivier

Meg Griffiths

Robyn LeRoy-Evans

Woman Falls Head Over Heels for Plant…

…But is Left Wanting

When this pair of images was made, I was single, lonely, questioning my desirability as a woman, and as an artist. In an attempt to feel productive, creative, and to pull myself out of this slump, I spent the day in my home studio, playing dress-up and toying with objects I had lying around the house. From this, the idea of the ridiculous woman, the “silly woman”, emerged: as I was working, I became aware of trying to connect with a glamourous side of myself, the desire to feel more attractive to the opposite sex, but ultimately the result is awkward, off-balance, sideways.

Influenced by a constellation of subjects, including erotic literature, Japanese aesthetics, contemporary dance, and the fashion photography of Guy Bourdin, my predominantly image-based practice has recently expanded into performance, video, and installation. Across this range of media, the body of the woman-artist has remained my central focus. Using the recurring motif of the covered, disguised, or faceless figure, my work seeks to explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual territories of the body of the woman-artist.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a Canadian mother and Welsh father, Robyn LeRoy-Evans spent much of her early life on the move. The new experiences, emotions, and challenges that unfamiliar locations hold are at the core of her practice, compelling her to make physical responses to her ever-changing surroundings. In 2012 she achieved a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University, U.K. Robyn has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in private collections in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. Robyn currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she is a proud member of The Front.

Ryn Wilson

Ryn Wilson is a multi-media artist in New Orleans. She works in photography and video, often incorporating other techniques such as collage, sewing, painting, drawing and installation. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from the University of New Orleans. Ryn works as a costume designer and has been a member of the artist run gallery, The Front, since 2014 where she exhibits, curates and co-founded an annual shorts film festival.

Pantomorph seeks out the element of mysticism in ritual and objects. Objects can be harbingers, messengers or signifiers for personal prophecy. It is said that objects with spiritual significance present themselves to someone rather than that person finding it. This tradition is ancient and has roots in alchemy, which attempts to transmute and purify objects of lesser value into those of greater power. 

Tara Wray

Tara Wray is a photographer based in rural Vermont. She is the author of Come Again When You Can't Stay So Long, a photobook follow up to her 2006 documentary film Manhattan, Kansas (SXSW 2006). Born and raised in Kansas, Wray studied documentary filmmaking at NYU. She curates interviews with photographers at Vice, Huffington Post, and BUST Magazine, and is photo editor at the literary journal Hobart. A new book of photos titled Too Tired for Sunshine will be released by Yoffy Press in 2018.

I can’t walk past a dog in a car and not want to take its picture. There’s something about the fact that they’re trapped in a tiny metal and glass prison that I find compelling. Sometimes they seem comfortable with their lot and other times they look like they’re not sure anyone is ever coming back. Their faces are immediately honest and they don’t mince words about their willingness or unwillingness to be photographed. I’m drawn to photograph the emotion of a situation. I suppose in making pictures of animals I could be accused of anthropomorphism, but I think I can read a dog pretty well. They’re much more straightforward and obvious with their feelings than most people. I'm not shooting with any type of agenda. Trying to make the work “important” would ruin it, I think.

For information about Too Tired for Sunshine, published by Yoffy Press in March of 2018, please go to http://www.tarawray.net/.
 

Vanessa Centeno

Vanessa R. Centeno is a conceptual artist living and working in New Orleans. She obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Orleans in 2014 and her Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005.  

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas her cultural beliefs gave a colorful perspective towards iconographic objects and perceptions of religious mysteries. These perceptions move toward society’s obsession with the slick digital conveniences and lure of the American dream. Her concepts delve into the modern dilemmas of consumerism and the compulsions of material trappings. She has a fascination with the superficiality of glittery and synthetic forms that result in alluring vibrant compositions. Using painting, sculpture and video as her mediums she communicates her version of contorted perceptions and irrelevance of our material world.

Her work is part of the permanent art collection of the University of Texas, San Antonio. She has been a featured artist at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Contemporary Art Center, NOLA and was recently awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence for summer 2017.

In my photo compositions I use glittery, shiny, ephemeral materials to create colorful backgrounds to gaze at the grotesque and beautiful trappings of the female body. I am interested in the garish and glaring attractive allure of fashion and devices used for the spectacle of attraction. Slippery Catch explores the ways in which society looks at the superficial attractiveness of the female form and the luster effects it has within social media. The synthetic lens allows viewers to sensually explore the layers of our fascination with a sexualized culture and how objects and subjects operate through these enticing transparencies of popular culture.