January 14 - February 5, 2023*
Opening reception Second Saturday, January 14, 6-10pm.
Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.
*Open by appointment February 6-26.
Be sure to check out The St. Claude Art Rag for more info on the Second Saturday Art Openings on St. Claude!
programming this month:
Rooms 1 & 2
Kelsey Scult, stills from short film KNEAD, 2022
KNEAD ME PLEASE
GRIEVE ME PLEASE
Kelsey Scult
Collaborators: Daniela Leal, Marion Forbes, Sava Wolf, Lee Garcia, Julian Lopez
KNEAD ME PLEASE
This work explores the visceral, violent, and intimate processes of breadmaking and the ways in which they are reflected within the human experience. Yeast is a living organism and requires being pushed, pulled, drowned, and burned in order to grow into its fullest form; but in tandem with those traumas, the softness of human touch is just as necessary to usher dough into life. KNEAD ME PLEASE looks at the ways in which the human body and spirit are kneaded and how, like bread, we continue to rise.
GRIEVE ME PLEASE
I’ve spent the past several years grieving dissolved friendships. I have become so intimately acquainted with that grief; braided into it, around it, inside of it. I know now that the ache of grief I’ve been carrying is the calcification of love with nowhere to go. But what about those I have grieved? Have they grieved me too? In this piece I’ve woven together visual motifs from my previous works as a stand-in for myself, and left two empty chairs as an invitation for those I've lost to grieve me back.
Kelsey Scult is a New Orleans-based filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Her work explores the processing of inherited memory, the psychic untangling of intimate partner violence and the physical intersection of desire and decay. She produced the 2021 Sundance Audience Award Winning feature film “Ma Belle, My Beauty” which opened in over 40 theaters nationwide and was acquired for domestic and international distribution. She is an alumna of the New Orleans Film Society Southern Producers Lab and The Gotham’s Narrative Lab. She was a featured artist in the 2021 and 2022 “Louisiana Contemporary” exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Her short film SLICE is currently on the festival circuit.
Rooms 3 & 4
Elvira Castillo, To Resist or Surrender: Surrender, Digital Photography with framed ropes, 30 x 40 inches, 2022.
Elvira Castillo, To Resist or Surrender: Resist, Digital Photography with framed ropes, 30 x 40 inches, 2022.
The Unravelling
An exhibition by Elvira Castillo with Katalea Ford
The Unraveling is an invitation to examine the knotted strands in our lives that we disregard for fear of the breakage that we may find, and oftentimes, have caused.
What do we do when the strands are so knotted we don't know where they start and where they end? How do we begin to assess what's viable and what's not? Are the knots worth mending or do we cut them off?
The only way to know is to start.
Welcome to…The Unraveling.
Elvira Castillo (b. 1992, New Orleans, LA based) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her work explores intergenerational memory and trauma and how it manifests in the experience of marginalized communities. "Visual arts has given me a way to explore and express my most raw and deepest emotions fearlessly. I believe pushing the limits to what makes us uncomfortable is where we learn the most about ourselves and the world around us. This allows me to live empathetically, work with intention, and produce content that will impact the audience."