September 9 - October 8, 2023
Opening reception on Second Saturday, September 9, 6-10pm
with live performance by Christine Crook + Pete Fields at 7:30pm, followed by live music ft. The Whip Appeal at 8:30pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.
PROGRAMMING THIS MONTH:
Tuesday, September 26
7pm
ARTIST TALKS
featuring
Christine Crook + Pete Fields
Spinning Straw Into Gold
Ann Haley + Harley Holiday
TANDEM
Rooms 1 + 2
Spinning Straw Into Gold
Christine Crook + Pete Fields
Spinning Straw Into Gold is a collaborative mixed-media installation by Christine Crook and Pete Fields. With costume, sculpture, found objects, murals, and performance, this immersive installation blurs the lines between reality and imagination, taking viewers on a surrealistic journey through dreams, liminal spaces, magic, ritual, and alchemical transformation.
Inspired by Surrealism, the artists embrace instinct and intuition to create a language of symbols that go beyond the literal, inviting multiple levels of perception. They transform everyday objects into thought-provoking pieces, and weave together passages from existing poetry, prose, and music for their opening reception performance. By combining different sources, Crook & Fields explore the interplay between words, images, and meaning, inviting the audience to actively engage with the artwork and interpret its significance.
This piece also acknowledges the significant role of alchemy in the works of surrealistic art. While alchemy traditionally refers to the transmutation of base metals into gold, the artists embrace alchemy as a magical process of psychic transformation. They examine how individuals distill the essence of their unconscious towards personal growth and improving life at larger levels of community and culture.
Through the juxtaposition of their distinct styles, Crook and Fields embrace tension and contradiction, seeking to achieve a "Coniunctio," a medieval term popularized by Carl Jung. This alchemical union of opposites taps into the collective unconscious allowing new insights and the manifestation of a greater wholeness. “Spinning Straw Into Gold” challenges binary constructs and dichotomies between humans and nature, as well as cultural gender roles. It proposes a more fluid notion of a selfhood that is interconnected with all aspects of existence, ranging from nature and our personal experiences, to the universe. With humor and abstraction, the artists explore the potential of a world that reconfigures the idea of a "unified self."
Stoking the alchemical fires that other great artists, philosophers, and mystics once stoked, We intentionally reference, recycle, and honor the imagery, words, and music from these artists allowing them to noticeably be a part of our work.
Leonora Carrington
Remedios Varo
Anne Sexton
Alejandro Jordorowsky
Neil Young
Ella Fitzgerald
& multiple unknown artworks of Medieval Alchemy
Christine Crook + Pete Fields, Spinning Straw Into Gold, mixed media- costume, sculpture, found objects, murals, and performance, 2023.
Pete Fields is a musician, visual artist, and educator currently living in New Orleans, Louisiana. He considers himself a community based artist, interpreting and recycling the sites and sounds of his environment through simple & cheap art forms such as comics, graffiti and folk music. Growing up in San Francisco's Mission district neighborhood in the 80's and 90's Pete's world was shaped heavily by the vibrant street culture, ethnic diversity, and political action of his parents and friends. Most transformational to him at this time was the cross pollination of creative forces at play in the neighborhood around him. Punk rock music, soap box derbies, old time fiddle, underground comix, sign painting, latin jazz, bernal hill...all stimulated his artistic nature and showed him the possibilities of forming a strong community through art. A loner by nature, Pete has used the creative process to open himself up to new people and ideas and intentionally strives to bring people together through his own music and art.
With “Spinning Straw Into Gold" Pete for the first time, in collaboration with his wife and artistic partner Christine Crook, displays his visual art indoors. Through his research of Alchemical philosophy and Surrealist Art, and his revisiting of 20 plus years of personal sketchbooks and graffiti/mural documentation, he has fused his art with Crook's to detail the negredo and albedo, the black and white, that first imbues the alchemical transformation. As if walking into one of his sacred "Black Books", the viewer's own world disappears and the introduction to the supernatural begins to take place.
@slowmocowboys
slowmotioncowboys.weebly.com
Christine Crook is a costume and performance artist based in New Orleans. Her wildly strange costumes and performance art are a recent divergence from a long established career in costume design for theatre, opera, and dance. Through this divergence she experiments with abstract costumes that re-imagine the structure of how design is utilized in performance, and offers a poetic interpretation of character through costume and other visual forms. Her recent studio work is inspired by traditions in drag, folk art, the occult, and global masquerade. These influences are often blended through an eccentric campy lens that celebrates women, and challenges stereotypes of gender, and sexuality. Christine’s work aims to allow the costume to exist on its own as a magical sculpture distorting and transforming the body of the wearer. Christine has presented design-driven live art and costume installations with Metalhaus Gallery, Failed Films Festival, Dream Farm Commons, FILF Fashion, Z Space, and Shotgun Players. She was awarded a Bridging The Gap Grant for continued experimentation with costume design funding a gallery residency in Berlin 2017. She also participated as an artist in residence with Light Box in Detroit 2019. Christine has an MFA in Costume Design from UC San Diego, and teaches costume design with the Academy of Art University.
In her work, "Spinning Straw Into Gold," Christine delves into the realm of incarnation, magical creatures, and the transformative power of costumes. Drawing inspiration from fairy tales, surrealism, myth, ritual, and magic, Christine explores the liberatory potential of costumes blurring the boundaries of a gendered experience. Referencing the Garden of Eden, where man and woman were separated and shamed by God, Christine metaphorically represents this garden with creatures and textures to invite viewers into a dream world where the lines between reality and fantasy begin to blur. Her costumes become incarnations of mysterious creatures, performing obscure ritualistic acts that are incomprehensibly hermetic. Through these acts, Christine aims to embody the spirit or deity in an abstract quality, exploring the idea that divine beings can take on many earthly forms. Through her art, Christine also embraces a mischievous childlike humor hoping to subvert any potentially pedantic spiritual weight. This work is an exploration of the transformative power of art and the boundless liberatory possibilities that arise when we embrace our unconscious imaginations.
@christineandthecrook
christinecrook.squarespace.com
Rooms 3 + 4
TANDEM
Ann Haley + Harley Holiday
TANDEM; working or occurring in conjunction with each other; to give and receive simultaneously.
In an immersion of paintings, drawings, ceramics, and film, Ann Haley and Harley Holiday probe the intimate dialogues between past and present, partner and self, and vessel and body to reveal a narrative revolving around themes of mutual support, the evolution of the self, and the resilient nature of the human body.
In their individual works, Haley and Holiday contemplate the nature of time itself by delving into the profound connection between paying homage to their roots and honoring their growth and how that connection shapes our understanding of self and identity. Both artists use mediums that aid these explorations through their material natures.
Haley employs a multilayered oil painting process that symbolizes the interplay between what lies on the surface and what is buried deep. Embedded within these layers is backwards writing that acts as a mirror, both between the artist and herself, as well as herself and others. Within this mirror, she invites viewers to introspect on shared identity struggles, implying that “to look at me means you have to look at you too.”
In her painting titled FLUID (what is your body holding onto?) Haley explores how trauma tends to settle in our body's most vulnerable parts. She reflects on the burden of chronic pain and her body's resistance to fluidity. Her piece face it (you have to) rigidly illustrates the depth one must reach to confront their inner struggles. In a dialogue with these themes, Haley's paintings like the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, SAD (it’s okay), secret waterfalls (safe place), feed me, mem map, and bird in the sky (how good it would feel to be) serve as gateways to her past. Artworks she made during what she terms “the before” (as an emerging artist between 2009 - 2014, prior to her life-changing car accident) undergo a profound transformation into rewritten narratives. She carefully preserves what was effective and extracts what wasn't in an attempt to heal her former self and break her cycles of self doubt and destruction for her future self.
Holiday utilizes clay to explore bodily fear. We cannot fully exact our will upon clay; working with this medium forces us to move and bend in the way that it wants us to move and bend. As we shape clay, it shapes us in tandem. Much like how one cannot control what happens to a piece once it enters the kiln, we cannot fully exercise our wills upon our bodies. In the end, our human vessels will call out their needs to us: for rest, for movement, for touch and warmth and water. When we lean into the needs of our bodies, everything flows. It is much the same with clay. The material itself has a corporeal quality; it can bend and stretch, form and reform in a cyclical process of destruction and regeneration.
In their multi-piece sculpture Kondie, Holiday exorcizes and makes visible their struggles with hypochondria. Through the construction of a swan-shrine acting as a benevolent higher power, Holiday provides comfort for the little clay bodies trapped in the all-consuming experience of health anxiety. Woven throughout Holiday’s sculpture and drawings are motifs of human and animal bodies, exploring the idea of more-than-human creatures acting as benefactors, talismans and guiding forces within our lives, as well as the animal natures intrinsic to the human experience. Through the incorporation of work from previous years, Holiday explores the synergistic experience of holding past versions of self in tandem with the present.
The notion of tandem began when the artists both found themselves with broken bones at the start of the new year. A situation that initially felt unfair and burdensome transformed into a moment of resilience and mutual care. Amidst bed rest, leaning on each other to complete daily tasks, and venturing to physical therapy together, they made their collaborative painting titled PT.
Finally, in their film, tandem, which was made in collaboration with cinematographers Kelsey Scult and Marion Forbes, we see two separate beings who are actively embodying their past and present selves, while synchronously enmeshed with each other in an intricately shared experience.
Ann Haley + Harley Holiday, tandem (film stills), Co-Directed by Ann Haley + Harley Holiday, Cinematography by Kelsey Scult + Marion Forbes, Edited by Kelsey Scult, 7 minutes 43 seconds (looped), 2023.
Ann Haley (Atlanta, GA, b.1991) is a multimedia artist, curator, and educator living in New Orleans, LA. She received a BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA in 2014. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions in Lacoste, France, Savannah, GA, Gainesville, GA, Kansas City, MO, and New Orleans, LA. Haley has worked in Art Education across New Orleans since 2014, most prominently at Mini Art Center, Youth Empowerment Project, and Waldo Burton Boys Home. She became a collective member of The Front Gallery in 2020, and has since exhibited work at the Contemporary Arts Center, SHED Gallery, Carroll Gallery, and Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, LA.
@annhaleystudio
annhaleystudio.com
Harley Holiday (Maui, Hawaii, b.1996) is a multimedia artist who grew up in Bolinas, California and currently lives in New Orleans, LA. Their artistic practice is rooted in painting and drawing, but clay has been their primary medium since becoming a member of London Clay Works in 2021. Beyond pottery and ceramics, Holiday is passionate about farming and social work. They joined the team at Grow Dat Youth Farm as a Crew Leader in September 2023, and are currently pursuing a degree in Sociology from College of Marin.
@moon__snail