September 12- October 4, 2015
Opening reception Saturday September 12th, 6-10pm
Room 1:
India Jacobs
Future Mythologies: Revisiting the American Dream
Middleclass consumer culture in modern American mythology – How the American Dream Fuels Capitalism...
After WWII, Booming industry afforded young families the opportunities to buy homes in the suburbs, car to get them there and consumer goods to ensure a comfortable lifestyle. Marketing these goods to this demographic became less about the product and more about how it would represent their level of taste and status.
Today, generations of Americans works tirelessly to fulfill their duties as consumers and surround themselves with the accoutrement this dream dictates. All leisure time activities and disposable income are aimed at achieving comfort, security, and distraction. My work aims to critique the resulting values this pattern yields in the middle class consumers who embody this dream.
Taking cues from the work and rhetoric of Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy in their critique and lampooning of the American Dream, I have circuited my own mythological environment that seeks to exaggerate and exacerbate this All‐American myth through the lens of middle class leisure activities, recreation, and tourism culture. The placement of this architecture above the Hollywood Hills is fitting in that it creates a tension with California’s historic drought, and that it complements L.A. existing culture of true fictions and hyper‐realities.
A large scale airships destination affords the middleclass consumer the opportunity to experience the short term benefits and enjoyments offered by a water dense biome and the luxuries (i.e. golf courses, spas, leisure pools etc.) that require the use of large quantities of this increasingly scarce resource. It represents a mentality common among the middleclass and upper classes that equates money earned with freedom to do and experience what one pleases regardless of social or environmental impact.
By creating an environment free of the hassles of water conservation and the awareness of historic, debilitation drought, the full bandwidth of reality is short‐circuited by a desire to RELAX.
Having recently graduated from Tulane University with a Master of Architecture degree, India Jacobs works primarily with technical drawing software and 3D design tools, as well as hand drawing and painting to create her works. Focusing on largescale conceptual architectural projects, India’s drawings combine technical drawing and careful design with a bold, theatrical illustrative style. These drawings often subtly and humorously juxtapose social inequality and ignorance with bright, playful compositions.
India was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, where she currently resides. She has previously exhibited work at Richardson Memorial Hall and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
https://www.behance.net/indiajacobs
http://issuu.com/indiajacobs/docs/ijacobsportfolio
Room 2:
Jeffrey Thurston
This Shifting Vessel
As of late, I find myself drawn to images of shipwrecks as inspiration for my work. There is something bold and hopeful about a ship with its ability to navigate the unforgiving seas, whereas a shipwreck represents our hubris. This choice of ships and shipwreck as inspiration stems from the uncertainty I feel towards the future of cities and whether they will be drowned by our hubris or rebuilt through hope. The ceramic medium lends itself to this apprehension. At inception clay is infinitely changeable and full of possibilities, but after the first firing the work is forever set. By representing vessel like structures frozen in a state of flux I am referencing our cultures indecisiveness and leave it to the viewer to decide the intended progression of these objects as ships or shipwrecks.
As a working ceramicist, Jeffrey Thurston looks to how the mediums fragility can become a source of visual strength. As a native of the San Francisco Bay Area his fascination with the city was derived from taking BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into San Francisco. The train offered a view of backyards and alleyways that contrasted with the street view of manicured facades. This contrasting view of a city continues to color Jeffrey Thurston’s work and guide his interpretation of a cityscape.
Jeffrey Thurston received his BFA in ceramics from California State University, Chico and is currently pursuing his MFA at Tulane University. As well as his home state of California, his work has been exhibited in Texas, Oregon, Montana, and Colorado and is also part of the permanent collection of MONCA (Museum of Northern California Art).
www.jeffreythurston.com
Room 3:
Kyle Bravo
Making Jamie
In the fall of 2014 my wife Jenny was pregnant. As the pregnancy progressed there were all these new experiences and milestones that were coming and going so fast, and I started to get this feeling that all of these important, meaningful little moments were forever slipping away, lost to time and my own poor memory. I had the urge to somehow start documenting the pregnancy and eventually decided to make a daily comic, even though I had pretty much no previous experience of doing such a thing. The drawings were pretty terrible at first, but I didn’t really care much because in the beginning I was only making the comic for the eyes of Jamie and Jenny. As time went on though, I started to think about sharing the comic with the rest of the world and so I started to get more serious about the drawings, the dialog, the pacing, etc. The comic documents from about half way through the pregnancy up to when Jamie was one month old. I’m really glad to have this record of this special time in our lives and really look forward to the day that I can share the comic with Jamie. I imagine he’ll say “Whatever, dad. You’re lame.” And I’ll say “I love you too, son.”
Kyle Bravo is an artist and musician who lives and works in the upper 9th Ward of New Orleans. He teaches art to pay the bills then goes home and spends time with his wife Jenny and the best baby in the world, Jamie. Occasionally he finds a few spare minutes to draw comics. Kyle is a founding member of The Front and has shown all over the place, from New Orleans, to New York, to Tokyo. Back when he was a young and idealistic punk rocker, Kyle edited the book Making Stuff and Doing Things: A Collection of DIY Guides to Doing Just About Everything, published by Microcosm Publishing, which is amazingly still available in your local anarchist bookstore. Kyle’s most recent musical projects include fiddling with his 4-track in his garage and his band Koozie Basket.
kylebravo.com
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/6370062-making-jamie
Room 4:
Kelly A. Mueller
Brand New Atlas
The works in Brand New Atlas continue to reflect my interest in the themes of natural cycles (propagation, decomposition, tidal shifts, seasonal markers...) and our own heavy-handed tendency to compartmentalize, impose our own lists and schedules onto our surroundings. There's poetry between those layers, somewhere. Recently, the presence of the studio itself as a filter for these images, in its digital, material, and habitual preoccupations, has been prominently recorded.
Originally from Chicago, Kelly arrived in Baton Rouge, LA only two weeks before Katrina. She is currently a member of Baton Rouge Gallery and has also exhibited with New Context/Kasia Kay Gallery in Chicago, in Scope Miami and New York, and has been published in New American Paintings and Studio Visit Magazine. She has attended several residencies, including Hambidge, GA; Stone House, CA; Philadelphia Art Hotel, and a trip to the Amazon Rainforest as a Surdna Fellow. In line with her growing interest in the Louisiana Wetlands, she recently received a Jazz and Heritage grant to build and float traditional wooden pirogues with her students at Lusher Charter School. Along with her two dogs and two chickens, Kelly has made Mid-City New Orleans her home.