March 14- June 7, 2020

LATEST NEWS: The Front is reopening! Our four exhibitions from March are still up for your viewing pleasure. Further to the mayor’s protocol for reopening Phase I, we are pleased to announce that The Front will resume regular gallery hours (Saturdays and Sundays 12-5pm) along with appointments for private viewing. All recommended protective and social distancing measures will be observed, including the following:

-All visitors and staff must wear a face mask.
-A 6’ distance is required between everyone not living in the same household.
-No groups will be admitted.
-The restroom will be unavailable.
-Staff will disinfect commonly touched areas and provide hand sanitizer for visitors.

Thank you for your support and see you soon!

Virtual exhibitions of each room:

Room 1:

People, Places, and Shadows: New Work by Augustus Hoffman

I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what connects these paintings and I keep coming back to something Edward Albee wrote in Zoo Story: “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

Whether it is the speckled purple shadows on morning asphalt or friends dressed up for the peachy glow of the race tracks, I seek things that induce a type of happy anxiety in myself. I’m drawn towards things that refuse my impulse for stillness.  I’ve learned that 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.

In all of these paintings there are moments when I could have taken a shorter, more direct route. But instead I took the long way around.

I often found myself on a self-imposed exile that forced me to ramble along the edges a bit longer: A slice of pizza inserts itself on an imaginary table. Red paper hands obscure a silvery yellow dress.  A pink flamingo threatens to wreak havoc. This exile is often frustrating and inconclusive. But I’m not sure that it isn’t necessary. This meandering tends to keep me light on my feet. It tends to keep me hungry. 

Augustus Hoffman is an artist who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has studied at Bard College, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Studio School. He has taught at Bard Early College, The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, and The Contemporary Arts Center. Augustus has shown his work all over the country most notably in New York City, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He was recently an artist in residence at the Mount Gretna School of Art. This is his first show at the Front Gallery. 

www.augustushoffman.com
@Augustushoffmanfineart

Room 2:

Rose McBurney, Grace Mikell Ramsey, Tom Walton, Laura Velez
I Close My Eyes



I Close My Eyes features the work of four figurative painters who draw from anxious dreams, archives, and stream of consciousness visions to produce imagery that places their subjects within a realm of mystery and occult fantasy. 

Rose McBurney

Using myself as subject along with family and strangers, I construct compositions in which clothed figures either alone or in groups express existential feelings through gesture. Taking refuge in grainy degraded color pallets referencing the past and relying on strong light sources I reduce my figures to their pithy bulk.  Although I am alarmed at times by the resulting effect it is the calmness that arises from the figure’s diffuse circuity and the negative space around them that serves as a counterpoint. My work ultimately relies on the balance of opposing forces and their tension as a place of inquiry.  In some of my darker pieces this can be expressed as anger squashed down, resigned to weirdness with a comic edge that acts as a loophole to save me from the double bind of the human condition.

Rose McBurney is a figurative painter living and working in New Orleans La.  She  takes inspiration from home movies, the collective unconscious, friends, family and her own inner eye.  As a primarily self taught artist it is through McBurney’s organization  and tenacity that she has maintained a steadfast commitment to a regular studio practice since 2011.  This ongoing commitment to the studio allows  herself  the time  she needs to fully explore her places of inquiry. Her current work seeks to understand man’s  will  to  exist  in  the  face  of  mediocrity,  by  pausing  in  the  weird  moments  of  everyday life. McBurney has shown in a number of galleries locally and nationally including,  Jonathan  Ferrara  Gallery,  New  Orleans, Hall-Barnett Gallery, New Orleans,  Superfine Art Fair, Miami, and Hair and Nails Gallery, Minneapolis. 

https://www.rosemcburney.com/

Grace Mikell Ramsey

Working loosely from my own experiences, memories, musings, introspections, and fears, my paintings function in a dreamlike narrative space between fantasy and reality. I explore themes of girlhood and womanhood, using elements of ritual, magic and religious iconography to give color and light to what is kept hidden or left unsaid. These are the secrets of an insular world, but if there are mysteries in these scenes, there may also be moments of uncanny familiarity. Though this work arises from my private thoughts, I hope that it opens itself to possibility. The narrative and emotional threads grow richer and more complicated with every viewer who might think, for a moment, I’ve seen or felt or dreamed this before.

Grace Mikell Ramsey lives in New Jersey and is an Assistant Professor of Art at William Paterson University where she teaches painting and drawing. She received an M.F.A. in Painting from Tulane University in 2012 was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Award that year. In 2014 she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Career Opportunity Grant. Her work has been shown nationally, including at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, the Historic Arkansas Museum, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Art Gallery, and the Art Fair 14C Juried Show in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her work has been published in the Oxford American, Artvoices, Arkansas Life, The Idle Class, and Momma Tried.

https://gracemikellramsey.com/

Tom Walton

I find the subject matter for my paintings and drawings in my everyday world.   My paintings begin with the impulse to fulfill my curiosity about the subject.  As I translate a chair or a person to a two-dimensional surface through paint or line the painting becomes takes on a life of its own, I become equally engaged in observing its natural evolution.  As I am painting the emotional content of the image reveals itself, the painting becomes a balancing act: on the one hand completely letting go and embracing the sub-conscious and on the other engaging with the formal aspects of the image.  Remaining present in the process gives me insight into my relationship to the subject, and to myself.

I have two transitory processes I am engaged in while painting.  The first is observing the subject matter; I want to find out why I am interested in the subject as I paint it.  The second is responding to the painting itself. When I paint a person, I want who they are to inform the nature of the painting process as much as I do.  The emotion conveyed in the figures is often a surprise to me; they can convey emotions I did not previously associate with the person or myself, the process of painting a person reveals deeper empathic connections.

The paintings do not have a determined finishing point, I stop painting them when the subject has moved on or another subject has come into focus.  I feel that all of my works are still moving; even if I am not adding to them, I am still viewing them, their evolution is ongoing.

Tom Walton, 40, was born in Oxford, United Kingdom.  As an infant his parents relocated to Washington, DC. Beginning at age 16, he studied with the artist Carlo Pittore.  Walton received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and is MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in 2007.  Walton has shown Nationally, in 2018 he had three person show of his paintings at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia PA and a solo show of his paintings and drawing at St. Mary’s Hall in San Antonio Texas, in 2012 he participated in a three-person show of his still life painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts Alumni Sales Gallery, and in 2008 had Solo Shows of his portrait and figure painting at Cabrini College and at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware.  He has a painting in the permanent collection of the Woodmere Museum. He curated a National show of paintings titled “Real to not Real” and the “13th annual Louisiana Fine Arts Showcase” both at Southeastern Louisiana University where he is an Assistant Professor of Painting. He has upcoming solo show of his paintings at Gross McCleaf Gallery in October of 2020.  Walton is married to the artist Laura Velez and lives in the Uptown Area of New Orleans.

http://www.tomwalton-studio.com/

Laura Denisse Velez

This work explores a fictional narrative from the constructs of my mind.  Centered around a post-apocalyptic world; I am trying to feverishly grapple with the catastrophic results of Global Warming and Climate Change to humankind. The narrative begins with humans existing in a subterranean environment and maintaining the hope that there can be human life on the surface once again. Eventually an unearthing or rebirthing of human civilization onto the surface is a hoped-for possibility.  Yet, this tumultuous process will require the utmost in human resilience to innovate under the restraints of their current environment and limited resources.

These emotional narratives are about mankind’s expeditions and excavations to rediscover their past place of home.  Whether they have the technology and ingenuity to make earth habitable after an unrecognizable surface is revealed on a highly toxic terrain. This work serves to be a reflective paradigm shift in our own understanding that we are all co -creators in manifesting abundance or scarcity into our reality and to ponder whether they can be perceived to be two sides of the same coin.    

Laura Denisse Velez was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  When she was three years old her parents and siblings relocated to Luling, Louisiana.  Velez received her BFA from Louisiana Tech University 2005 and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007. During her thirteen years in Philadelphia, Laura worked for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Velez has been featured in many shows in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas including a solo show in 2011 at Cabrini College titled Permission; Radnor, PA. Velez currently is participating in a group show at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Velez is married to artist Thomas Walton and currently lives in New Orleans.  

https://lauradenissevelez.com/home.html
@ldvlz 

Room 3:

Thomas Friel
It's OK to Cry, Son

A lot of white men confide in me, since I am also a white male. They are afraid of losing their privilege, which is scary stuff; not appreciating something until it's gone and the fear of being marginalized like every other person or group has in order for that privilege to exist. Of course, straight white men like myself will never be able to truly comprehend oppression because we will never have to. Nor are there groups out there actively calling for us to be oppressed, since anyone who has experienced what that is like wouldn’t wish it on others. Save those crocodile tears for something that is truly hurtful, like how we treat indigenous people, black people, brown people, Asian people, how we erase someone’s identity by denying gender fluidity, how we are destroying the world in the name of capitalism, choking off the hopes of future generations for the excess and laziness of this one. (Feel free to list those I have missed)

I use abstraction to engage with its relationship to a broad understanding of the Domestic and its place within whiteness, colonialism, American Exceptionalism, and class and gender constructs. The formality of abstraction accesses its historical relation to the concept of whiteness and its erasure of lived oppression of other cultures and peoples through the negation of narrative and individuality.  In various states of abstraction, these works aim to question the role of class, power, privilege; as well as utopian ideals of the universal over the actuality of oppression through privilege.

https://thomasfriel.com/home.html

Room 4:

SRĐAN LONČAR
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PLACE A CALL

I see my payphones project as one that responds to and continues this legacy. Made out of concrete and installed around the city at approximately 25 different sites, the meaning of this work will emerge slowly through daily encounter. Over time, their status as monument will come to light, and passersby will be lead to a provocative question: what history do these objects memorialize? What legacy is both marked and erased by these mute, if enduring and obstinate objects?