January 11- February 2, 2020

Opening reception Saturday January 11th, 6-10pm

 Rooms 1 & 2:

VISION QUEST

New Members show featuring Lily Brooks, Erica Christmas, Sokari Ekine, Augustus Hoffman, Craig-Anthony Ismael, Jeremy Jones, Rosalie Smith, and Shannon Stewart.

Lily Brooks, Backyard Weather Station, Eskridge, Kansas, 2016; Doppler Radar in Pasture, Wabaunsee County, Kansas, 2016

Lily Brooks 

From the ongoing series We Have to Count the Clouds, which traces the visual remnants of our relationship to both daily weather and climate change. 

Lily Brooks received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art + Design and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She uses photography to examine our complex relationship to the natural world. Her ongoing photographic series We Have to Count the Clouds traces the visual remnants of our relationship to both daily weather and our changing climate.

Recent solo exhibitions include “We Have to Count the Clouds” at The Front, “Siren Call”, a 2018 exhibition at the Volland Store in the Flint Hills of Kansas, and “Drawing the Moon” at the Austin Preservation Society in Austin, TX. Selected group exhibitions include “Forces at Work”, a three-person show at the Visual Arts Center in Austin TX, the 2016 Magenta Foundation Festival Exhibition in Toronto ON, and the 2017 Louisiana Contemporary Exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is the recipient of a Guidebook Grant from Antenna Gallery, New Orleans (2018), and an Archive Documentation and Preservation Grant from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation (2019) for her project, The Spillway. Brooks has been interviewed by NPR’s Central Standard for KCUR, Aint-Bad Magazine and Crusade for Art. Her work has been published in the Austin Chronicle, Cabinet Magazine, and online for PHOTO-EMPHASIS. She is Area Coordinator and Instructor of Photography at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Recent NPR interview: https://www.kcur.org/post/seg-1-kansas-weather-seg-2-rolf-potts-and-souvenirs#stream/0
http://www.lilybrooks.net/
IG: @lilypbrooks

Erica Christmas

These portraits that are included in the new member show are apart of a new body of work that I'm developing called 'Meet me in Pelusa, Baby.' Pelusa is spanish for 'fluff' so I'm making a body of portraiture that exists within the world of the living and the world of the imaginary (i.e. constructed) -- I'm working with primarily black and brown bodies and setting up 'sets' within the mundane of the ordinary world. 

 Born in 1990, Erica Christmas is an artist and writer out of New Orleans, LA. Her work deals with blackness, intimacy, love, and consumerism. She is a photographer and multidisciplinary artist with a focus on text narratives, portraiture, and alternative imaging. She was the founder of an independent publishing press known as, Sisster Press, from 2014 to 2020.

IG: @sissssster

Sokari Ekine

Sokari Ekine, October 2010, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 8x10”  

Ways of Dying: Death as History, Port-au-Prince, January 12th, 2010.

January 12th, 2020 marks the 10 year anniversary of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Leogane and its outer perimeters including Port-au-Prince, in the late afternoon.   Approximately 250,000 people died, a further 300,000 people were injured many losing arms and legs.  Over a million people were made homeless and forced into internally displaced camps around the capital.      

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption was destroyed in the earthquake with some 100 people buried in the rubble.  Rubble, and makeshift tarps came to symbolize death and destruction of that fateful day and its aftermath.     The pain remains, the memories though faded remain but we breathe and live, create new life and death is always there.   These photographs honor those who died, those injured and those who continue to live.  

Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian British feminist photographer, educator, and writer. She has worked in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the US.  Her work focuses on decolonization, sexuality, and African spirituality.   Sokari is one of the first African women to blog;   Black Looks which includes a ten-year collaborative archive on LGBTIQ+ Africa.   She has worked in adult education;  as editor and columnist for international online magazines;  published in academic journals on gender, militarization and LGBTIQ+ politics and contributed to four groundbreaking publications on Africa including co-editing the Queer African Reader. 

In 2013 she received the International Reporting Fellowship from John Hopkins to report on health justice in Haiti. During the fellowship she began her journey as a photographer, exploring Haitian Vodoun, and creating the photo essay “Spirit Desire”.  In 2017 she received a grant from the Global Arts Fund for her visual documentary,  "The Vernacular of Freedom, and the Politics of Rescue in Queer Futures”  which contemplates the centrality of spiritual practice for LGBTIQ+ Kenyans.  She is the 2019 recipient of the Monroe Fellowship from the Center for the Gulf South in New Orleans for support of her photo essay “Altars: Black Ecologies of the Spirit”.  

Her work has been exhibited widely including at AfroFutures during Art Basel; PhotoVille, New York; in Brazil and Germany. Her photography is housed in the Caribbean collection of the Amistad Research Center, and at Xavier University both in New Orleans.   

www.sokariekine.me
www.blacklooks.org
IG: @blacklooks_
TWITTER: @blacklooks

Augustus Hoffman

I seek things that induce a type of happy anxiety within myself. 
I care less about assigning a specific meaning to something as I do about the space between the thing and the finger attempting to point at it.
Associative meaning lasts longer than our initial impulses for control.
Seeing is less an act of uncovering as it is a proactive denial of everything else.
Re-framing can be a valuable form of distortion.
Objects carry more weight when we sense their presence and not their namesake.
I’m drawn towards things that refuse my impulse for stillness. 

Augustus Hoffman is an artist based in New Orleans. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Art Students League, and Bard College. Gus has shown his work all over the country; most notably in Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans. He currently teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts and Bard Early College. Augustus is thrilled to be part of the Front.

 http://www.augustushoffman.com/

 Craig-Anthony Ismael

www.Craig-Anthony.com

Jeremy Jones

Jeremy Jones was born in 1991 in rural Indiana. He obtained his BFA from Indiana University in 2014 and his MFA from Tulane University in 2016. Working as a visual arts educator, he currently lives and creates in New Orleans. Through oil painting, Jones uses the familiarity of ordinary objects and refuse, asking the viewer to decelerate, take time to engage with the subject matter, and appreciate their worth through deliberate consideration.

www.JeremyJonesPaint.com
IG: @jeremyjonespaint

Rosalie Smith

Rosalie Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work thematically addresses impermanence, attachment, and grief. She is a co-founder of Lucky Art Fair, an art fair with a socialist financial model, inspired by the difficulty emerging conceptual artists face in finding both space and income from their work. She has shown her work at The CAC, Antenna Gallery, Southern Heat Exchange, and Aquarium Gallery, among others. As of 2020 Smith is a member at The Front.

IG: @rosalieglsmith

Shannon Stewart

Shannon Stewart regularly collaborates with filmmaker Adam Sekuler and others to create dance films.  Together, they curate RADAR, Exchanges in Dance Film Frequencies and tour film programs in the US and Canada. 

Shannon Stewart is a multi-disciplinary choreographer, performer, educator, and organizer based in New Orleans. She has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance from Tulane University.

www.shannonstewart.org
IG: @thesurealshannonstewart

Room 3:

Jared Theis
Golden March

The past seven years I have been building a type of personal mythology or system that follows a group of fantastical creatures through time and stages of evolution. These investigations are realized through sculpture, installation, performance and video. I use the system as a lens to look back at life on earth, human societies and our own evolutionary path. I’m particularly interested in vulnerability and how organisms adapt to their environment. The narratives in my work are reinterpretations of mythological themes I learned from childhood. I explore the origins of these characters, their relationship to their environment and spiritual growth. Many of the characters are driven by primal instincts. Over time some have evolved and discovered new means of engaging their environment. I use extinction events, deaths and natural disasters as a means of accelerating this process. I move back and forth through time where events that occurred thousands of years before affect the outcome of the present and future. Some of the characters have a childlike innocence while others are manipulative and cruel. They awkwardly navigate their world to the best of their abilities. I play the role of these characters, utilizing sculptural suits that connect me to these spaces. The suit becomes a means of entering these worlds and exploring different states of being. During the performances I imagine myself as a survivalist creature, enacting a series of rituals that have deep roots in my own experiences. I see these rituals as a means of reconnecting with a very distant, deeply embedded part of myself. I document the performances through video and use the documentation as a foundation for building the mythology. The work speaks to a kind of nostalgia or sentimentality from another time. This human longing of a utopian world where “everything’s going to be alright”. Music videos and children’s television programming of the 1970s and 80s are important references in building the mythology as well as shape-shifting performers like David Bowie and Prince. I’m also attracted to kitsch, camp and the question of what is good taste or has meaning in our culture? I like to arrive at larger issues through humor. As the characters evolve, many elements from our cyber-obsessed culture have entered the work such as video gaming and social media. One character has a cooking show, another is a karaoke singer, another a tragic figure. They exist in an alternate world strangely similar to our own.

Jared Theis was born in 1977. He earned an MFA from the University of California, Davis in 2012. While in California he received a Joan Mitchell MFA grant and the Robert Arneson Award. In 2014 he was awarded a Statens Kunstnerstipend from Kulturrådet, Norway Arts Council in Oslo. He has attended residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, KHIO, National Academy of the Arts in Oslo, Norway, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and was recently awarded a residency at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway for 2020. He recently exhibited his work at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway, Mass Gallery, Austin, Texas and the Oslo Prosjektrom, Norway. He currently works between Germany and Texas.

https://www.jaredtheis.com/
IG: @jaredtheis

 Room 4:

Craig-Anthony Ismael
For The Love of a Black Man 

For The Love Of A Black Man is an ongoing project focused on the celebration of the black male. The Photographs in this project serve to portray an intimacy and sensitivity that can exists between the two black men. The Viewer is forced to view the black body through the perspective of another black man. I was interested in the way media has portrayed the black male through a white perspective, often consisting of violence or the dissociation of the man from his genitals.

The project consist of Penis Out Of Focus, which ask the viewer, when given the opportunity to gaze at the black male, what is it that you choose to focus on.  Black Orchid, which points out the correlation between the process of an orchid opening to reveal itself and the process of anal sex. The image serves as a celebration to the act of receiving and the power that one can withhold after coming to terms with your own pleasures while outgrowing the expectations of what society deems as masculine. Lilac Heart is an invitation to the viewer into the warm, loving, and comforting gaze of the subject.

The Project also consists of the series My Nigga, My Saint. In 2019 I was accused of stealing a cellphone from a white female donut shop worker. After being cornered and having my pockets searched I was reminded of all of the black men that found themselves in similar predicaments, being falsely accused; The Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till, Mack Charles Parker, most of which lead to the death of these men. A thought came to mind about the way we are taught to react to the black male and what it would be like if imagery were created not asking for respect and acceptance, but demanding it by being portrayed as religious saints. What would society think of gay black men if we were taught that these men were just as worthy as the biblical figures that some grow up praying to? For The Love Of A Black Man exists to showcase the diversity that exists within the black gay American community and to create a space for black men to see themselves praised wholly. No matter where in life you may find yourself, know that you are loved.

Craig-Anthony Ismael is a self-taught photographer from Brooklyn, NY, Born in 1989 to a Jamaican mother and Bajan Father. His photography focuses on the way sexuality, tradition, and religion can co- exist within the human identity. After living in Brooklyn for 25 years, he has since called Hawaii, Santa Fe, NM and Los Angeles, CA home. Having moved to New Orleans in the beginning of 2019, Craig- Anthony celebrates a one year anniversary with the first showing of his work and the start to an exciting year as a new member of The Front. Upcoming projects include Oh Mama, Times Have Changed. Faggots Don’t Hide in Closets and I’m Growing Weed in Front Yard and the ongoing For The Love of A Black Man.

www.Craig-Anthony.com