September 10 - October 1

Opening reception Second Saturday, September 10, 6-10pm.
Gallery 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!

Programing This Month:

Cicada Screening Series
Shorts Night

Sunday, September 11, 2022
Doors: 7:30pm, Screenings: 8-9pm

The Front (in the backyard)
4100 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117

Cash/Venmo bar by donation

Join us for Shorts Night, the first installment of The Front’s new Cicada Screening Series. Curated by Samantha Best and Kelsey Scult, the line up includes seven short videos by artists:

Zuri Obi
Camille Lenain
Dave Greber
Cristina Molina
phlegm
Wesley Chavis
Liang Luscombe

Stay tuned for details on future screenings in the series including a Music Video Night and Narrative Night!

room 1

Chris Rhone, Untitled, inkjet print on kraft paper, 8x10 inches, 2022.
Eugenie Shinkle, Slider, laser print on copy paper, 11x11 inches each, 2022.
Mica Herrin, Untitled, Polaroid film, 4.21 x 3.46 inches, 2022.
Klaudija Visockyte, appearance 1, archival giclee print, 23.375 x 33.125 inches, 2022.
Dominika Jackuliakova, Object 219, silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches, 2020.
Devin Blaskovich, Untitled, laser print on metallic paper, 6x8 inches, 2017.
Andy Pham, Chew the Fat, vinyl print, 18 x 24 inches, 2022.

Sedate the Hornet
Andy Pham (curator), Chris Rhone, Eugenie Shinkle, Mica Herrin, Klaudija Visockyte, Dominika Jackuliakova, Devin Blaskovich, and Jessa Bruce

Frederick Douglass believed that photography is the “mirror of society”.

Contemporary trends in photography often dictate that work made by certain people look a certain way, or be about a specific subject matter.  For photographers who are people of color or women, being a part of these marginal demographics is both a gift and a curse.  We carry the burden of needing to break through glass ceilings and open closed gates, while also being at a turning point, historically and institutionally, where these things have become perhaps more easily achievable. 

But being pigeonholed into a space where creating means creating what is expected of you, based on race or gender, is detrimental to the art form as a whole.  The photographers featured in this exhibition do not examine personal history or identity politics, as many would expect them to do.  They do not address concepts of race or gender, or fixate on their own identity as a catalyst for artmaking. 

Instead, they forge other brave new perspectives, making work unequivocally on their own terms, and unwavering from their own interests and desires.  The subject matter ranges from the natural landscape to the human-built environment and infrastructure, to documentation of urban and domestic life, to the search for emotional catharsis. 

Our personal identities and narratives will always color how we think, act, and create, but that doesn't have to be the beginning and the end of the conversation around work by women and people of color. 

By foregoing identity-based image making and sociopolitical contexts, these photographers expand on Douglass’ idea.  Photography is indeed a mirror - not only reflecting one’s own visage, but perhaps more importantly, that of the world around us. 

Chris Rhone is a self-taught photographer from Kenner, Louisiana whose work comprises a collection of photographs taken throughout his daily life in South Louisiana and other places traveled.  Whether it’s on a walk or a drive, he’ll have a camera in hand.  When not documenting, he dabbles in conceptual and portrait photography inspired by novels, films, and video games.  He is the co-founder of the New Orleans based photographic artists group Outer Circle and has participated in the Salon Arts Residency at Canal Place and Outer Circle’s “Room” exhibition at Yes We Cannibal in 2022. 

Eugenie Shinkle is a photographer and writer based in London, UK. She is co-editor of the photobook platform C4 Journal. Originally trained as a civil engineer, Eugenie works exclusively with multiple images, combining and ‘rebuilding’ them to form new constructions. She almost always shoots on expired film.

Mica Herrin is a lifetime photojournalist who specializes in analog and digital photography. She has been published in the STUDENT PRINTZ in 2016 and 2017 and XPRESSIONS MAGAZINE in 2020 and 2021 as well as online forums. Many of her photographs encompass travels from throughout the states and from studies abroad. Recently, she has focused on portrait photography outdoors and in studio.

Klaudija Visockyte (b. 1995) is a London based artist, working with photography, drawing and text. Her practice currently explores the intricate characteristics of analogue photographic processes and how these translate in printed matter.

Dominika Jackuliaková is a Slovak photo-based artist, and studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (AFAD) in Bratislava, Slovakia. She has lived in both Bratislava and abroad, and regularly returns to her hometown, Lučenec. Her projects are primarily influenced by her experiences traveling between home and abroad, with a specific interest in the indefinite border between the permanent and the temporary. Using analog technologies, she creates photographs of the inhabited landscape and found still lifes.  Selected solo exhibitions include the Filter Space Gallery (Chicago, USA), Gallery of City Blansko (Czech Republic), and Photoport Gallery (Bratislava, Slovakia).

Devin Blaskovich is a visual artist and photographer based between California and New York City. He is represented by Assortment Agency for commercial & editorial projects.

Andy Pham (b. 1988) is a photographer, writer, and curator from the New Orleans area.  His visual work centers around inner psychological experience and its relationship to the external environment, through documentary and conceptual photography. He has written for local and international publications. He is the co-founder of Outer Circle, a photographic artists group based in New Orleans, and has been a member of The Front since 2022. He is a self-taught artist and does not hold an arts degree from any institution.

Jessa Bruce is a multi-disciplinary artist from the New Orleans area. Her grocery list typically consists of milk, eggs, bread, mirliton, death, avocados, tomatoes, breath, popcorn, and weed.

Shinkle @eugenieshinkle
Herrin @mica.worldwide
Visockyte @k_______v________
Jackuliakova @dominikajackuliakova
Blaskovich @devblaskovich
Pham @subtropicalghost_
Bruce @lashwednesdaydrag

room 2

LIANG LUSCOMBE, MALAMADRE, 2022, HD VIDEO, VIDEO STILL, 12:42 MINS.

Malamadre
Liang Luscombe

Join us for the first exhibition presentation of Australian artist Liang Luscombe’s new short film, the science fiction extravaganza Malamadre (2022). At The Front, the narrative video transforms into an immersive, multi-channel installation. Taken from the Spanish word for the “bad mother” spider plant, Malamadre is the latest work in Luscombe’s ongoing surreal comedy series that follows Sol and Fran on their intergalactic odyssey away from the financial horrors of Earth and towards the planet Howl.

Opening with a sickly Fran and a hangry alien puppet Alice, the film immediately casts doubt on the promise of Howl as a utopia. What Fran finds instead is a strange matriarchal world of asexual reproduction where mothers feed on their young. Will Fran reckon with her maternal fears and finally enjoy a symbiotic alien relationship? Moreover, will she make use of the planet’s five hundred beaches before they close at 5pm?

Artist Bio
Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and moving image that engage in a process of questioning how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She has been included in screenings at ACMI, Melbourne; Table, Chicago; Composite, Melbourne; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; AceOPEN, Adelaide; MetroArts, Brisbane; OpenTV, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; and Vehicle, NYC. 

She has undertaken residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, 2022; Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, Chicago, 2019; SOMA Summer, Mexico City, 2018; Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome, 2013; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, Perth, 2011.
www.liangluscombe.com
@liang_xlxo

Curator Bio
Samantha Best is an arts administrator, independent curator, and member of The Front, an artist-run gallery in New Orleans. Prior to joining the Seattle Art Museum as Senior Manager for Exhibitions and Publications, she managed contemporary art exhibitions for the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; the U.S. art triennial Prospect.5; and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. After earning a BA in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University, Best pursued a MA in Art History from CUNY--Hunter College where her research focused on how the internet is shaping contemporary art and exhibition-making.

She has been a curatorial fellow at The Artist's Institute and Hunter College Art Galleries, a Graduate Curatorial Intern at the New Museum, and launched an online curatorial project, Tête-à-tête (tete-ahh-tete.net). For The Front, she has curated solo exhibitions of New Orleans-based sculptor Kyle McClean, painter Ann Marie Auricchio, Canadian sculptor Nicole Levaque, and group exhibitions Imbolc and Summer Reading, the latter at Tulane University’s Carroll Gallery; and in partnership with New Orleans book press Tilted House, hosted monthly Rubber Flower Poetry Hour events.
@meanwhile_backattheranch

room 3

ANITA COOKE Overflow Baggage Claim, Installation- 12’w x 12’l x 80”h, Pegboard, hardware, mixed media, rope, vinyl 2022

Overflow Baggage Claim
Anita Cooke

The word “baggage” can hold different meanings. It can refer to the physical bags we carry- our purses, backpacks and suitcases. Another way in which the word baggage is used can have a negative connotation when used to refer to a person as someone with “baggage.” When used in this way we are saying that there are issues that have built up over time that need to be addressed or changed. In this installation work I am using both meanings of the word baggage to address an overflow of human-made material that has had a negative effect on our planet. To live on the earth today is to participate on some level in ways that add to this pile-up; it is virtually impossible, given the way goods are made and marketed to avoid doing this. When Mr. McGuire, in the 1967 film “The Graduate” famously said to the young Benjamin Braddock: “I just have one word for you: PLASTICS...there’s a great future in plastics, will you think about it?” he certainly wouldn’t have envisioned something like the 80,000 tons of plastic twice the size of Texas called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is one of the resulting realities of the booming plastics industry today.

These sewn vinyl bags carry just a small portion of the “baggage” that my own household has accumulated in the last 8 or so years since I first started to collect our plastic bottle caps, dryer lint, and my own thread scraps from my sewn art-making, among other items. Picture an actual plastic bottle connected to all those bottle caps and how much space that would occupy! My husband, who walks daily in Audubon Park, began collecting both plastic and wooden golf tees, so while they are not ours, it is a collection that I chose to incorporate into this piece.

In order to change situations and create solutions that move us forward, we need to first own and know our individual responsibility for the conditions that exist and the resulting burden we have imposed on our planet.

Anita Cooke has lived and worked as an artist and teacher in New Orleans since 1980. She earned her BFA in Ceramics from Kent State University in Ohio and her MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture at Newcomb College/Tulane University. She has taught ceramics and 3-D Design at Tulane University, Loyola University, Stephen F. Austin State University, Western Michigan University, and out of her studio in New Orleans. Her commissioned twenty-eight foot ceramic mural, “LightSounds,” can be seen on the campus of Western Michigan University. Anita has been the recipient of several awards including a Louisiana Fellowship Award. Cooke is currently working with sewing and fabric, mixed media, collage and installations. Her work has been shown nationally and is in many private collections throughout the United States.

Anita Cooke @anitacookeartist

room 4

Anita cooke, NewsFeed: No Picnic, Installation: Mixed media: paper, found objects, Acrylic gel, various hardware, fishing line, window screening, artificial turf, beads, 6’w x 9’l x 8’h, 2022

NewsFeed: No Picnic
Anita Cooke

Have you ever experienced an upset stomach or otherwise felt ill upon hearing about disasters or other violent events on the news? As human beings we feel empathy and compassion when learning of traumatic events and often hold the suffering of others physically within ourselves. People reveal that they often “dose” or limit the amount of news and media they consume because they experience actual physical distress or feel depressed after watching, reading or listening to news. A study published in Clinical Psychological Science titled “Media Exposure to Collective Trauma, Mental Health, and Functioning: Does it Matter What We See?” postulates that while it is important and appropriate to be “...informed about events in our world, prolonged or excessive exposure to media coverage also may serve to amplify and heighten public anxiety and fear.” “NewsFeed: No Picnic” uses a play on the word “feed” to reveal how the attempt to “digest” negative news can, rhetorically speaking, feel like eating a plate of rocks and sticks. “NewsFeed: No Picnic” attempts to address how news overload can affect our health by correlating the excessive number of daily negative news events with decidedly visceral, unrefined, inedible dishes of “food” laid out as a darkly humorous picnic meal.

While this piece shines a light on our often-adverse experience of this continuous bombardment, it also implies that there are tools available for healing and for avoiding the ill effects of too much media. We may, indeed, need to limit our individual exposure to a “Daily Dose” and also find ways to counteract its influence by purposefully seeking ways to experience the beauty and goodness of life on our planet.

Little Kitchen

Anita Cooke, Not Your Mother’s Apron, Mixed media: canvas, bicycle tire tubing, thread, vinyl, burlap, polyester ruffle yardage, produce bags, wool felt, duct tape, electrical parts, window screening, found objects, rope, various found hardware, paint, Four aprons, variable sizes, 2022

Not Your Mother’s Apron
Anita Cooke

I think of these aprons in relation to the domestic apron of the 1950’s- the kind my mother wore to protect her clothing when I was growing up. Those aprons were typically of the lightweight, frilly, floral sort. These aprons, in contrast, are rather thick and weighty and while they do incorporate the traditional non- functional ruffle, they reference more an industrial toughness instead of the conventionally ‘sweet’ feminine look. In the making of the aprons I concern myself with questions and thoughts about domesticity, ideas about protection, armor and ‘women’s work’, women’s strength, the layering of materials, the industrialization of food production and preparation, and weight- both emotional and physical. I try to be both serious and to impart a sense of whimsy in these works.

Anita Cooke @anitacookeartist