May 9th - June 7th, 2026
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm & by appointment (reach out to an artist)
Programming This Month
Saturday May 9th, 6-10pm
Opening Reception, Second Saturday
Saturday May 23rd, 5-7pm
Sip & Craft with is
Friday June 5th at 7pm
Andres Arauz and Abby Meyers: Artists Talk
Room 1
is, Show Announce, photograph
is, Blank Alternate - Show Announce, photograph
is, Artist Event - Sip & Craft, photograph
Ephemerist
is
“Ephemerist” offers an invitation to examine daily consumption habits and think ahead to how these may be transformed as we restructure the type of world that works for all. As things fall apart, we are encouraged to turn to thoughts of reconstruction, and how we may use curiosity, wonder and imagination to create something new amidst the wreckage.
is: turns a mass of post-use, gallon water bottles into a meditation on blight, reindustrialization, and other challenges facing her chosen home of the Lower Ninth Ward. “Ephemerist” seeks to bring to life questions of how one moves around blocked thoroughfares if proposals like the Grain Train or Industrial Canal lock expansion were materialized.
Wholing Center #4: (lower) Ninth Ward, New Orleans
A wholing center is an act in addition to a place. It is a redemptive moment that counters degradation. An act of healing or “wholing” physical spaces that have been the site of societal disruption.
Wholing Center #4 attempts to transform and reclaim the experience of living in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward as it contends with new attempts to reindustrialize residential neighborhoods, repeating a history of prioritizing profit over people. Living a block from the street which is the main artery to safety from storms, I reckon with the effects of blight, or what seems to be an intentional dissolution which can be used to validate change, a common issue in many historically Black neighborhoods. Imagining a reactivated railroad bisecting the main thoroughfare is too frightening to hold on to sometimes, just as one endures the daily walk past piles of trash on the way to work.
My chosen coping method was conversion, taking account of my own contributions to the material mess, witnessing and questioning habits of consumption, being forced to see it all add up, acts of penance, deconstruction and reconstruction. Saving bottles of water prompted me to think of the world we are living in and moving toward. Taking them apart and putting them back together was a meditation on how we prepare for the future, what knowledge is to be acquired and transformed. Focusing on play activism to counter environmental racism, this work is in honor to my chosen home, and those working to preserve the residential neighborhood from proposed challenges like a Grain Train and Industrial Canal lock expansion.
Thank you to Kerry who heard of this act of saving daily used post-consumer materials and silently stocked up on my behalf before supplying me with a box of goodies. Thank you to Ilana for modeling the practice of stockpiling used materials for crafting, and for introducing our household to recycling back in those middle school days. Thank you to the aunties, mama and maternal figures from Ville Platte and Alexandria, Pineville, Boyce and Lake Charles, Louisiana.
For my aunt still living in our family home, hanging her trash in the trees to keep from pests and decorating square inches with the flickering lights of chandeliers. For my ascended aunt, who alchemized regular household items into gold. For my mother, who figuratively and literally shares light with all she encounters. And all those known and unknown who were moved around the world and ended up in Central Louisiana. To all the organizations and loved ones who have shared love and support. And to this world that is falling apart so we may take up the task of mending and piecing back together, piece by piece.
is: leaning into the handcrafts of the women in her lineage who turned domestic decor into works of art. Investigating connection through acts of making, saving, and reimagining. Prompting connection to nature, self and other through interactive means.
Room 2
WHOLENEWWARDCONCEPTION1
Sly Watts
In my visual work, I’ve been on a journey of moving from 2-D to 3-D work & developed a fascination with wires. I’ve fallen in love with the way galvanized aluminum wire behaves when it is bent. I’ve used it in my work to represent both caution & intrigue. These sculptures are based on songs I am writing & performing. Though I view the works as demos, they allude to a cultural manifesto. The work investigates boundaries. It reflects on how illusionary things observable to us can breed personal temptation. In my music, I am writing about the concept of seduction and how I’ve been interpreting several aspects of life as sirenical. I find myself fascinated with the threshold between decorum & carnage. There is an ever-existing human contradiction in society. I view this dissonance as both a prison of our own desire & a portal into our own truth, an opportunity to explore an underworld of true honesty in order to achieve personal growth. I write more and more about these nuances, & the honesty that reveals how ugly I feel we all are underneath the version of ourselves we present to society. This ugliness can feel alienating. I see beauty in that space. As a native New Orleanian, this work responds to New Orleans’ nightlife, debauchery & indulgence. While investigating that space, I envision a new environment for lucidity. A place for curiosity. A place where beauty is a weapon, not a vulnerability. A place where alertness is power. As the city I’ve known evolves as a metropolis, I envision a place where there is safety in truth, despite all of the changes, the destruction, and the same cursed, dark energy.
A whole new ward.
Sly Watts, born & raised in New Orleans, LA, works in various mediums, mapping forms of emotion & movement. He taught himself several creative skills, & used this skill-set to begin developing music & artwork. His large-scale sculptures are depictions of figures representing ideas that are discussed throughout his music. Sly’s music experiments with hip hop, pulling from jazz, funk, electronica, & rock, among other genres. His work explores abstraction, character, & the relationship between solace and chaos.
Room 3
Things That Grow in the Dark
Taylor Balkissoon, Maji James and Port Sisters Farm
Rooted in soil and shadow as memory and possibility, this work explores what emerges in unseen conditions: beneath the surface, beyond extraction, and within collective care. As a city and a community, many of us depend on nightlife as a very necessary space for connection, care, and release. Much like a mycelium network thriving under the forest floor, some of our most generative moments of resistance have been built on the dance floor and each other’s back porches late at night. Taylor Balkissoon’s video narrative and sound mix explore years of voice memos and iphone videos taken after dark, under the moon and the neon, when we let our shadows and hearts lead the way. Maji James contributions will feature bioluminescent algae, fungi, & bacteria, as well as a Miyawaki forest, compost, agar plates, and mycelium-based works, creating an evolving environment where growth, decay, and regeneration unfold in real time. Blurring the line between ecology and art, what it means to be human & part of nature, this is an invitation to witness interdependence, engage with microbial worlds, and consider how what we pay attention to grows – even in darkness.
Taylor Balkissoon is an artist, community organizer, curator, and spiritualist. They are the founder of the grassroots art and mutual aid organization Uptown Laundry, the astrology columnist for Antigravity Magazine, and a current member at The Front. Their work explores both the spiritual and the mundane, and consists of sculpture, collage, installation, sound, and video. They are interested in art forms that interrogate interpersonal and generational issues, and creative practices that facilitate sustained collective growth and healing.
Maji is a land steward, educator, and community scientist working in mycology, soil remediation, and material science. He cultivates soil, plants, fungi, and community, engaging land as a site of restoration & liberation. He is a co-founder of Port Sisters Farm, Myco Mutual Aid & Pleasure Club, Myco Bayou Coop, and Woven Roots Community Gardens.
Port Sisters Farm begins with soil as memory and possibility. Rooted in the wisdom of the Three Sisters, we collaborate with the land to restore balance through reciprocity, protection, and shared care. Through soil, water, fungi, and community-led systems, we cultivate resilience, interdependence, and a culture grounded in deep relationship with the earth.
room 4
Andres Arauz and Abby Meyers, To Get to the Other Side: A Correspondence, 2026.
To Get to the Other Side: A Correspondence
Andres Arauz and Abby Meyers
To Get to the Other Side is a collaborative body of work which considers safety as both destination and condition. The work emerges from lived experiences shaped by violence, including sexual and domestic abuse, and a generational history of displacement and emigration. In this context, safety is not a certain endpoint but a horizon pursued through distance both physical and temporal, conviction, and survival instinct.
Using compositional clusters of found images and confessional free verse poetry wheat-pasted on wood panel, this transit toward sanctuary is considered through proximity and intersection. Each walking figure has been lifted from its own unique and ambiguous context. Their stories—however we may understand them—are reframed or reimagined as they interact with one another and become part of a collective condition, interwoven through fields of first-person memory. By presenting the poem in fragments on the figures’ silhouettes, it becomes another member of this crowd of characters, nodding to the interiority of the people depicted on these panels.
The work considers the crossing of paths as each of us engages in our own movements towards our own refuge; the providence—both seen and unseen—that guides where our bodies go and why; and the record and remembrance of these steps as they accumulate across time.
A Correspondence is a visual, written and street art collaboration between Andres Arauz and Abby Meyers in Memphis, TN.
Meyers, is a native Memphian and award winning filmmaker whose practice is rooted in poetry and extends into visual art and floral design. Arauz was born and raised in New Orleans, LA, specializes in collage, design, and photography and works as an art educator. In 2017 he moved to Memphis where he and Meyers met and soon after began making art with one another, and have continued to collaborate ever since.
“A Correspondence”, became the name under which Arauz and Meyers created work with one another. Inspired by Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School –– a collective of New York-based artists who collaborated on works through the postal service –– the collaboration began as a physical exchange. Arauz would create notecard-sized analog collages and pass them along to Meyers, who would write “micro poems” in response, meant to be consumed in tandem with the visual piece. This ongoing process has expanded and taken on various forms including guerilla murals and works on wood panel that continue to explore the relationship between text and image.