February 7- March 8, 2020

Opening Reception, Friday February 7th, 6-10pm **differs from our usual schedule because of Krewe Du Vieux Parade

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Selections from The Front’s Open Call juried by Ron Bechet

Lisa Marsh                                                               

Lisa Marsh’s studio practice uses drawing and painting to explore ordinary human experience in the context of a fragile world. Materiality and surface are central. Reaching beyond composition and color, instinctive uses of hand and brush determine pictorial outcomes, along with drips, incidentals and erasures that arise from the act of drawing with paint. Marsh’s recent works center  on the crisis of mass-migration and topics ranging from the relevance of guns to the status of girls/women. Marsh looks to imbue paintings with emotive qualities that invite speculation, inquiry and introspection.

Mathew Batty                                                          

Matthew Batty was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up in and around Florida. Batty’s artistic practice is as diverse as the landscapes and ecologies they are inspired by. They are a multi-disciplinary artist working across such mediums as video, sculpture, sound, social instigation, and image-making. Their work explores themes of dark ecology, the manufactured division of nature and culture through myth making in modern N. America, and environmental justice in the anthropocene/plasticene/capitalcene. Utilizing the muddiness of the in between to create new visions of coexistence and speculative ecologies of nature cultures, exploring fragmented moments within the anthropocene and hyperobjects like global warming.

Daniel Savage                                                       

Daniel Savage is an Australian based disabled artist, curator and advocate working primarily in photography, video and performance. His practice is concerned broadly with perception - investigating the way our perceptions influence and affect our interactions with art, each other and the physical world. His work is often self-referential, employing his individual experience of disability as a point of difference to engage audiences in exploring and reassessing established ideas and pre-conceptions that exist within society.

Risley Cline                                                           

Risley Cline (b. 1996) is a visual artist from Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.A. in Art from University of California, Los Angeles in June of 2018 and works primarily within the mediums of photography and painting. Her work has been shown in multiple galleries in Los Angeles such as the New Wight Gallery, the Dortort Center for the Arts, Gallery 800, and Avenue 50 Studio. Her most recent show and artist talk took place at the Kirschman Artspace New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in November and December of 2019. Cline currently lives and works in New Orleans, LA.

Anika Steppe                                                       

Anika Steppe was born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI. She earned a B.S. in Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College, and an M.F.A. in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been exhibited most recently at Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Paradice Palase in partnership with ChaShaMa (Long Island City, NY) and Tugboat Gallery (Lincoln, NE). Her writing on photography has appeared in Saint Lucy’s One Picture/One Paragraph and her photographs have been featured in Houston Center for Photography's spot Magazine and Pilot Press’ Over There: A Queer Anthology of Joy, among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Malo Residency (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico), Monson Arts (Monson, ME) and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). She is currently the Richardson-Spica Artist-in-Residence Fellow at Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, MI.

Noah Kashiani                                                   

Noah Kashiani is a Chicago based artist whose work carefully balances harmony and discord. Creating work communicates the idea of artwork as a product, exposing the irony of today’s gluttonous society. Nods to consumerism are often represented which explore the idea of exclusivity, value, and the translucent validation that comes with material items. Kashiani’s work has been shown in galleries across the United States and Mexico and has participated in residencies such as Joya Air (Velez Blanco, Spain), Casa Lu (Mexico City), as well as at California Institute of the Arts (Santa Clarita, California).

John Alleyne                                                      

John Alleyne was born on the island of Barbados. At age sixteen he migrated to Brooklyn, N.Y., and became influenced by Hip-Hop culture, specifically Street and Graffiti art. As a point of departure, Alleyne looked to hairstyle-guide posters commonly found in Black barbershops and salons. John Alleyne’s work challenges stereotypes of Black masculinity, and representation by presenting allegorical narratives through the use of spray paint, and silkscreen-collage.

Brinley Ribando                                     

Brinley Ribando uses her work to capture the most important moments in her life. She feels that the way a song or a film can make someone feel like they have lived a lifetime of experiences all in one moment, and this informs her painting. With the use of vibrant colors and surreal imagery, these moments come to life in her world of visual art. She captures the importance of the people and world around her, and puts a piece of herself in each one of them.

Matthew Bivalacqua                                           

Matthew Bivalacqua  was born in Metairie LA, 1981. Inspired by the loss of his mother and father at a young age, Bivalacqua began to pursue art as a means to create meaning, or as he would say, “to share inspirational moments with an expressive interpretation.” Bivalacqua received undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Fine Arts in 2015. In 2018, he received his Masters degree in Fine Arts, from the University of New Orleans. Bivalacqua’s process draws subjects from his narrative, to express a sentiment, a historical relation, or convey an identity beyond an object’s or environment’s manufactured function. The surfaces he creates are technical manipulations of traditional practices for applying mediums. Some of his influences are Van Gogh’s still lives and David Hockney’s joiner photographs.

Brit Krohmer                                                      

Brit Krohmer currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and works in a variety of media including sculpture, installation, photography, and drawing. She received her MFA in New Media from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2017.Krohmer’s work combines seemingly incompatible visual languages; personal and ancient relics are mined for their formal qualities and transferred into a variety of media. They consider the profound using carefully collected, altered, and constructed artifacts while conflating the performed and authentic. Her work addresses the abundance of objects, their significance, and their future. Readymade objects act as vessels that contain valuable information about human euphoria and anxiety.

H. Grace Boyle                                      

H. Grace Boyle’s affinity for working with marble drives her art practice. Despite its being a difficult, temperamental, and physically taxing medium, after completing her first marble sculpture some twenty plus years ago, the hook was set. Her subject matter and wandering gypsy ideas are variables; the stone is the nexus, the constant. She was born in New Orleans. After flirting with science and earning a degree in chemistry, she returned to art. In addition to studying at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art and taking graduate level art courses at the University of New Orleans, she was accepted to MFA programs in visual art in Philadelphia and New Orleans. She lives and works in the New Orleans metro area.

Belinda Flores-Shinshillas                                   

Belinda Flores-Shinshillas artwork has been of a contemporary nature using the figure and representational elements as an important component in the visual narrative, merging it with abstract concepts and techniques as a way to move through space. All the elements become a metaphoric voice, capturing the balance between intimacy and distance. Flores-Shinshillas prints, and paintings are an extension of her identity and culture, using form and color as an idea, an attitude, and interpretation that questions the permanence of the world surrounding her.

Megan Wolfkill                                       

Megan Wolfkill is a New Orleans-based visual artist and dancer who graduated from Tulane University with her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Choreography. Wolfkill’s work has been exhibited multiple times at the Carroll Gallery on Tulane's campus, including two juried exhibitions and her BFA Exhibition in which she shared the space with two other artists. Wolfkill has also choreographed and danced in numerous pieces through Tulane's Department of Theatre and Dance, and the Newcomb Dance Company. Recently, Wolfkill attended a two-week residency at The Hambidge Center in Georgia, and is excited to attend the Penland School of Crafts Winter Residency for the second year in a row. Wolfkill has exhibited paintings in juried group exhibitions across the country— from Illinois to Louisiana.

Shawna Stella                                                     

Shawna Stella graduated from Florida Atlantic University majoring in Studio Arts. She currently resides in New Orleans. Shawna's work is inspired by nature. She explores human's connection to the earth and to each other. Her work is influenced by spirituality, relationships and healing.

Sarah Trad                                                         

Sarah Trad is a video and fibers artist who explores the relationship between subjective and objective emotionality, navigating daily life and relationships while faced with mental illness, and the individual’s relationship to pop culture. Her work is focused on intersectionality, specifically, how race, class and gender affect mental health. Her fibers work centers around the concept of "inherited grief," and how symptoms of trauma can be passed down biologically and behaviorally through prospective generations. In her personal case, Trad’s work focuses on reclaiming an Arab American identity that was skewed by the death of her Arabic grandfather and the resulting mental illness of her family. The living embodiment of the correlation between chronic depression and binge-watching practices, her video work appropriates and manipulates found footage from movies, music videos and television. Trad’s work uses recognizable narrative structures to be viewed in and outside the academy of art.

Rachel Loyacono                                               

Rachel Loyacono grew up in a small town in rural Mississippi. There was little public exposure to fine art, however at a young age, Loyacano was captivated by her grandfather’s books of artists like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Manet- artists that to some extent still inform her work today.

Keith Perelli                                                       

Keith Perelli is a visual artist working in painting, printmaking and drawing. He received a Bachelors in Arts in Painting and Printmaking at The University of New Orleans and his Master in Fine Art from The University of Cincinnati in sculpture. His work explores a variety of social political and personal issues. He has participated in numerous, national and international invitation and juried exhibitions. Perelli is a recipient of a SURDNA Foundation’s Arts Teacher Fellowship, a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship, and a Foundazione Ratti Arts Fellowship His work was featured in the “University of New Orleans 3 Person Alumni Works on Paper,” Innsbruck, Austria and a solo exhibition at the Alexandria Museum of Art, LA. Perelli is a teacher mentor working and practicing in New Orleans. He shows his work at a gallery in Baton Rouge and group exhibits in New Orleans.

Paige DeVries                                                   

Paige DeVries artwork is an outgrowth of every day experiences, observations and insights culled from living in New Orleans Seventh Ward. DeVries subject matter, materials, and process of making work are intended to reflect the histories and idiosyncrasies of the immediate community, family and friends living in the Seventh Ward. Through BBQ's, birthdays, Second Lines, Mardi Gras Indian celebrations and calendar holidays, a beautiful visual culture and undocumented culture is brought forth.

Danielle East                                          `          

As a Black woman, Danielle East uses artistic abilities to create found object installations and poetry that explore southern Blackness, afro-futurism, and womanism in the age of Black Girl Magic. East’s work serves as a catalyst for bringing awareness to the complexities of being a Black woman. East Currently lives in Lubbock, Texas an artist-in-residence at the Charles Adams Studio Project and assists the program through various jobs in the Helen DeVitt Print Studio.

David Grainger     

David Grainger is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY and Fort Collins, Colorado. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Sculpture at Colorado State University. Making sculpture rooted in practices of drawing and performance, David examines the theatrical aspects of one material mimicking another. He develops psychological landscapes and stages for reflection which locate novelty or wonder within the mundane. Recently David’s work has been featured at Pierogi Boiler Space, NY Center for Book Arts, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Wassaic Project, Philadelphia City Hall, Governors Island, and The Yard in Colorado Springs.

Jaquelyn LeVan                                     
Jacquelyn LeVan is a self taught artist with a background in environmental science. Throughout her experience in school, she always knew that she wanted to pursue art but lacked the confidence to go for it. As a result, she does her best to create highly personal and empowering work that incorporates her education. By finding the beauty in the world around us, it becomes easier to come to terms with the impermanence of all things. The subject matter of her work usually revolves around the beauty of the life cycle and humans’ evolving relationship with nature while finding purpose in life.

Her mediums range from graphite pencil and gouache illustrations to preserved insects and flowers in resin shadowboxes. The message of transformation and evolution remain the same.