September 14 - October 6, 2024

Opening reception on Second Saturday, September 14, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.

Exhibitions

Room 1

Toward a Larger Freedom: Citizen-powered Democracy in Present-day Baton Rouge.

Installation

An interactive installation of oral history interviews with community leaders from Together Baton Rouge, a non-partisan economic and social-justice focused community organizing group. Audio interviews by Phillip Norman, Abel Thompson, and Maggie Connarro with photographs by Lily Brooks. Also featuring a short film about the civil rights leader Dr. Press Robinson and his decades-long pursuit of equal representation – including as a named plaintiff in Louisiana's recent Congressional redistricting lawsuits. His autobiography Pressing Forward was recently published by LSU Press. This film was made in part with the support of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and Together Baton Rouge.

View more about the project here: Toward a Larger Freedom. We hope you will register and vote.

@together_br
@together.la

Room 2

Waiting in Vain
garima thakur & Tabitha Nikolai

Installation

Waiting in Vain is a digital and physical installation that reflects on the Bengal Famine through speculative fiction and world-building. The Bengal Famine occurred during World War II in British occupied India, and killed an estimated 3.8 million people and over, making it one of the largest man-made famines in history. To this day there is no memorial anywhere in the world to those who died as a result of it. While historical and journalistic knowledge of the event is sorely needed, our approach attunes to key details of the famine and extrapolates them to place ourselves in emotional and narrative realities within. Ursula K LeGuin once said, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” We use sci fi, not as a way of imagining what comes next, but as a way of looking back and better understanding where we’ve arrived.

garima thakur is a friend, queer pressure cooker, interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator who is all over the place. She was raised during the 80’s and 90’s in New Delhi, India. She is interested in digging into the multitudinous nature of reality, cultural history, technology, and commonwealth shittery. She creates works that address assimilation, alienation, and the tussle of individualism and collectivism. Currently she is stationed in New Orleans, LA. Her work has received support from organizations like The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Open Signal. They love cooking and sharing meals together, and wish you would hit them up for snax. 

@garimath
http://garimathakur.com/

Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and based in New Orleans, La. She creates the things that would have better sustained her younger self--simulations of a more livable future, and the obstacles that intervene. These look like: fictive text, videogames, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. Her work has been shown at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Ganka Gallery in Tokyo, and has been covered by i-D Magazine, the New York Times, and Art in America. She hopes you're doing okay.

@tabby_twitchit
https://tabithanikolai.com/

Room 3

Our House Swallows Moths
Joshua Mintz

curated by Diane Appaix-Castro

Sculpture and Installation.

“This hollow cave is now stained by our family and my family before us….This home has soured...”- Esme

“If we are all echoes of each other, which one of us is the source” - Oli

“This house is alive, however its breath is escaping. Its being replaced with something else.”- Stanton

“Is it better to be at home in exile or in exile at home?” - Vi Khi Nao, Fish In Exile

‘Our House Swallows Moths’ is an almanac composed of 48 primarily handmade fragments from the timeline of a four-person family. This family portrait surveys the cyclical nature of time as moments oscillate between mundane and poignant and echoes of experience lose their origin in this sculptural poem. 

Shifting between the tangible and the psychological; scale and medium; and handmade and ready-made, ‘Our House Swallows Moths’ presents the viewer with a Promethean-like experience. The viewer breathes life into the sculpture, blurring the lines between fiction and reality as authenticity is challenged. This confusion opens room for germination, in which an intangible life is able to take root as the nooks and crannies of feeling human merge with shared experiences.

Joshua Mintz, Our House Swallows Moths (Detail: Fly on Newspaper), 2024
Joshua Mintz, Our House Swallows Moths (Detail: Breifcase), 2024

Joshua Mintz (b. New Orleans, LA) is a sculptor making handmade miniatures and almanacs. His work utilizes portraiture and storytelling by exploring the nooks and crannies of feeling human. Through his shifts in scale, medium, and narrative structures, he challenges boundaries such as fiction: reality, spectator:participant, presentation:representation.  

Mintz received his Bachelors of Art from Rhodes College in 2015 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019. He has shown nationally in Memphis, New Orleans, New Hampshire, New Jersey, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Texas. In 2022, Joshua was awarded The Helis Foundation prize for Best in Show in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Louisiana Contemporary, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver. Additionally, he has been artist-in-residence at Joan Mitchell Foundation (New Orleans, LA). He currently lives and works out of New Orleans.

@joshuamintz_art
https://www.joshmintzart.com/

Room 4

ONLY TAMPOPO CAN SAVE US NOW
Kelsey Scult, Marguerite Lloyd

Mixed media, video installation, paint, ink, illustration board, orange peels, thread, resin, touch, sweat.

The 1985 film “Tampopo” directed by Juzo Itami is an imaginative love letter to food (specifically ramen). It showcases ramen and the characters who consume it as sensual, sensory, erotic, and surreal. This exhibition - ONLY TAMPOPO CAN SAVE US NOW - recontextualizes the film within our current moment through an experimental installation. It reflects on how disassociated many of us feel right now, particularly the ways we are disconnected from our own bodies. It is an invitation to the artists' collaborators and the viewer to re-enter their bodies and be fully, wildly, and sensually alive through food, and each other. 

Much of Kelsey Scult’s creative practice is centered on the intersection of food and our humanity; grief, love, sex, death, and memory are all so deeply embedded in food. She continues investigating food as a medium and a mirror through this show’s video works which reimagines one of Tampopo’s most evocative scenes, re-enacted by New Orleans lovers and friends. The video pieces are activated by a site specific installation, featuring the meditative line drawings of Marguerite Lloyd and Scult’s sewn orange peel sculptures. Both their drawing and sewing practices are meditative and physically intuitive. Covering the gallery walls and floors with Lloyd's lines and Scult's sculptures imbues the space with the physicality and meditation they both harness in their processes. Situating the two artists' meditative physical creative practices in conversation invites the viewer to consider the ways they can use their own artistic practices as a means to become embodied.

This show is meant to be playful, joyful, tactile, strange, and magical; a catalyst for all of us to feel a little more alive and present. 

Marguerite Lloyd, Black and White No. 7, Archival ink and illustration board, 8x10, 2016.

Kelsey Scult is a New Orleans-based filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Her work explores the processing of inherited memory, experimental community archiving, and the intersection of desire and decay. Food and grief are her muses. 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 locally at The Front, Antenna, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Tulane’s Carroll Gallery, and The Parlour Gallery. She was a founding member of Lucky Art Fair, New Orleans’ first Contemporary Art Fair. She is the Manager of Filmmaker Services at the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) which supports independent filmmakers across Louisiana. 

@madame_kelso 
www.kelseyscult.com

Marguerite Lloyd is an architect and designer currently practicing in New Orleans. Through her professional work, she researches topics in urban planning, economics and architectural design. Marguerite’s independent work includes line drawings that reflect how attrition can create elaborate textures and expressions beyond the process itself. 

@orangejuane