June 10 - July 2, 2023

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

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:

FRONT and Center
a group show featuring The Front Collective, curated by Elliott Stokes
PLUG Gallery, Kansas City, MO
June 24 - July 21

Rooms 1 + 2

Summer White, Magnum Opus, Acrylic on Canvas, 5 x 4 feet, 2022.
Summer White, The Anatomical Cowgirl (detail), Acrylic on Canvas, 6 x 5 feet, 2023.
Summer White, Leda and the Swan (detail, in progress), Acrylic on Canvas, 5 x 4 feet, 2023.

Chains and Daisies
Summer White

“My art practice is imbued with the wildlands of psyche, the prodigious sensuality of the natural world, and the edge of brutal haunting and luscious yearning inherent within the feminine. The imagery I make explores the relationships between memory, instinct, sexuality, plants, myth, and anatomy. 

Figures, animals, objects, patterns, flora, fruit and fascia become cultivated landscapes of metaphor that strive to reclaim and amplify sensual agency in the body. The work is a carnal repatterning, a reckoning, a resurrection, a healing, an actualization, a hedonic prayer.”

Summer White is a New Orleans based artist. Her work devotes itself to being sensuous and uninhibited. Though painting is her main medium, she also does film photography and set design. By learning to converge these practices, she strives to create immersive and pleasurable environments of her work. Summer recently completed a 5 month artist residency at The Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She became a collective member of The Front in February. She was born and raised in Texas. 

@mademoisellebitch
@summmerwhite

Room 3

Kelsey Scult, GRIND ME, Multimedia Installation, 2023.

GRIND ME
Kelsey Scult

My great aunt Cioci, who just turned 100, was the first licensed female butcher in the state of New Jersey. This installation explores my ancestral legacy of butchery as an act of rebirth. When you make a sausage, you take something that is dead, grind it up, repackage it into a new object that has become a source of energy and sustenance. I invited women, femmes, and nonbinary people in my communities to submit items that felt dead to them, that evoked a part of their lives that no longer felt alive to them. I then ground these objects up and re-packaged them in panythose sausages. They serve as totems of release, of a communal catharsis, of a soft container for death and new life. The sausages are suspended from the ceiling in the style of an old butcher shop, much like the one owned by my great grandparents. 

In addition to the sausage installation is the accompanying film GRIND ME. The film is shot on 16mm, as this year is the 100 year anniversary of 16mm filmmaking, paralleling my great aunt Cioci's 100 year birthday. The film features me getting my knuckles tattooed with the word CIOTKA - polish for Aunt. The tattooing footage is intercut with footage of my friend's grandmother Lilia chopping meat. It is an intergenerational love poem between women's hands. Butchery, tattooing and cinematography are all intertwined with masculine and violent connotations. Within this work, all of those practices are softened and imbued with feminine touch and healing both in front of and behind the lens / needle / knife. 

Cinematography by A'mya McKnight.

Special thanks to Lilia Valdez-Lindsley, Grace Borrello, Katie Barroso, Holy Ghost Tattoos, Casey Shaw, Kodak Film Lab Atlanta, and every single person who contributed an object to this installation. Honored to release and transform alongside all of you. 

Most of all thank you to my Cioci. Niebiańskie zjawiska

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 received her BA from Oberlin College in Studio Art and her MFA from the University of New Orleans in Film. Films Kelsey has produced and directed have played at Sundance, SXSW, Frameline, Outfest, Atlanta Film Festival and more. She is an alumna of the New Orleans Film Society's Southern Producers Lab, The Gotham’s Narrative Lab, and the Southern Foodways Alliance Filmmaker Residency. She has exhibited her installation work across the country and abroad, including The Front Gallery, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Tulane’s Carroll Gallery, The Parlour Gallery, and Antenna Gallery (upcoming). She was a founding member and curator of Lucky Art Fair, New Orleans first Contemporary Art Fair. Her short film SLICE is currently on the festival circuit.

@madame_kelso
www.kelseyscult.com 

Room 4

Diane Appaix-Castro, Camera Revelatorium, Multimedia Experiential Installation, 2023.

Camera Revelatorium
Diane Appaix-Castro

As a continuation of a series of ponderings, Camera Revelatorium delves into the unknown. For some years I have been thinking about our perception and how our senses play a role in how we perceive. I believe there is more beyond what we can “see”, and I often think about how other lives interpret. For example, if I can never truly understand how you interpret the color blue, then how will I ever know how a jellyfish sees that same color? And although this example is easily understandable, there could be a world of such examples that lay way beyond what is available to us. This is the Unknown; the world of things that we do not know we do not know. And maybe it’s because we cannot even see the thing to begin with. What if jellyfish live in a world with far more creatures than we will ever be able to find because they have a way to see them that we will never even know to look for? Camera Revelatorium looks at one aspect of this massive question, sight and sound, and how what we see and hear may not fully describe the reality that other creatures live in. In this piece, a tool is necessary for us, humans, to better understand what we think we know of the reality of another being.

Diane Appaix-Castro is a French and Spanish sculptor and experiential installation artist born in Paris, France, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts from age four, and is currently based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University in 2022 and a BFA from The New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University. In 2020 she was awarded first place in DIY Art for the show titled Reconnecting in Quarantine at Tulane Hillel. In 2021 Diane received the SLA Graduate Student Summer Research and Write-Up Fellowship Grant and participated in the Southern Heat Exchange Online Residency. Diane also curates and directs Studio Appaix, an independent gallery in a New Orleans basement.

@diappaix_art