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Whitney White Linen Night 2013 and Louisiana Contemporary review
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on August 05, 2013 at 12:40 PM, updated August 05, 2013 at 3:00 PM
Whitney White Linen Night 2013, on Saturday, Aug. 3, was, like White Linen Nights past, a summer soiree to savor. Julia Street was a blizzard of art lovers in splendid summer fashions. Music echoed in the canyon of antique warehouses and the smells of inspired snacks rose to the heavens – the mounds of bacon frying in the New Orleans Hot Dogs tent was especially heavenly. Figuratively speaking, the high temperature didn’t seem to dampen the party, though, literally, it had the opposite effect. The Contemporary Arts Center, the beneficiary of profits from the big party, seemed to be raking in the dough at the outdoor bars and food booths — I hope so anyway.
The pointed vandalism of the night before, when someone spray-painted a gay slur near the center of the White Linen Night landscape, was probably on many attendees’ minds, but it didn’t seem to spoil the night. Here’s to good vibes burying bad.
Who made the creepy-cute stuffed spiders? I visited Octavia Gallery’s new spot on Julia Street, where I encountered a swarm of charming soft sculpture arachnids in a sunny corner. The glistening spiders, composed of clear vinyl and patterned fabric, were a showstopper, but I didn’t see the artist’s name. While wandering Octavia, I ran into artist/fashion designer Elizabeth Shannon, who had splashed her white suit with Yves Klein blue paint for the occasion – a nice touch. Near the front door, Keith Duncan’s big painting of a brass band was a knockout. I loved how gravity gathered at the edges of the canvas so that the streetscape wrapped completely around the perimeter.
There were a pair of mostly nude young women at the CAC painted silver.
For what reason, you ask?
For the life of me, I don’t know.
I didn’t visit most of the shows that I had written about in advance, because, I already had seen most of the art. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the things I hadn’t seen. Korean artist Key-Sook Geum’s exhibit of translucent sculpted jackets and dresses at Callan Contemporary Gallery, for instance, was an exercise in restrained elegance. I’m especially disappointed that I missed the Chewbacchus spaceship show at L’Entropot Gallery. How long is it up? The biggest hole in my preview coverage was the big juried group show on the Ogden’s fifth floor. Here’s my, uh, mixed review:
The Louisiana Contemporary 2013 — hold the anchovies.
The Louisiana Contemporary exhibit on the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s fifth floor is like a Caesar salad made with lettuce, crushed garlic, croutons, mashed potatoes, pineapple rings and gummy bears. Sure, the individual ingredients might be just fine on their own, but the overall effect is an aesthetic mess.
Practically speaking, big eclectic group shows like the Louisiana Contemporary are attractive for a few reasons. First of all, they’re romantic. They’re like open tryouts for a football team or an open audition for a big play. They give artists of all levels of accomplishment the hope of seeing their work appear in one of the city’s premier venues. For a small fee, any Dream State artist could submit paintings, sculpture or photographs to the Louisiana Contemporary curator for possible inclusion in the show.
It follows that big competitive group shows like the Louisiana Contemporary also give curators a chance to see lots of work they might otherwise miss. This year’s Louisiana Contemporary curator Franklin Sirmans – a Los Angeles-based star of the national museum world — will also select the international artists for the Prospect.3 New Orleans exhibition scheduled for 2014. Who knows? Maybe a heretofore little-known Louisiana artist will be chosen for P3 because of his or her appearance in the Louisiana Contemporary.
Finally, in any show that casts a net this broadly, the art-loving audience will be treated to some excellent work. Louisiana Contemporary 2013 is no exception. Here are a few standouts:
Monica Zeringue’s wonderful surrealistic self-portraits such as her arresting “She Wolf,” a mythical mother hovering over a fresh kill.
Cynthia Scott’s comical chandelier made from colorful plastic colanders, toy soldiers and whatnot.
Brian Guidry’s tongue-in-cheek yet touching 1960s living room in which the television perpetually plays Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom’s visit to bayou country.
Skip Bolan’s grandly gritty Carnival photos.
John Gargano’s giant ceramic hand grenade/perfume atomizer.
**Luba Zygarewicz’s constellation of repellant hair balls that spell out he words “touch me.” My personal favorite.
There are even more individually alluring works in the show, but despite the best efforts of the Ogden staff to hang the collection in a logical visual order, it remains a crowded aesthetic quarrel — Caesar salad with gummy bears
Luba Zygarewicz installs ‘A Thousand Threads’ exhibit atContemporary Arts …
NOLA.com
Luba Zygarewicz installs ‘A Thousand Threads’ exhibit at Contemporary Arts Center: Cultural Connection
By Linda Dautreuil
on March 20, 2013 at 12:00 PM, updated March 24, 2013 at 10:09 AM Print
Artists in all disciplines, particularly poets, writers, visual artists, and musicians, provide fresh ways of seeing and hearing the world around us. One method which frees us from the tyranny of the familiar is to repurpose ubiquitous objects and present them within the context of new meaning.
Sound impossible? Well, not really. Think of that Red Wheelbarrow we see anew in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Then along comes the tea bag. A small, unassuming, but useful tool for brewing tea, is this little square or triangle with the string attached. Here is a medium well-suited for infusing new meaning, for documenting a process, for moving a viewer through time and space by one who possesses the vision of hundreds of tea bags suspended on slim, delicate threads in the Emerge Gallery of the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans.
Mandeville-based artist Luba Zygarewicz, an avid consumer of the soothing brew, is a woman who understands spatial relationships. She finds creative ways to express the intersection of interior and exterior spaces by means of the daily rituals in the life of one who lives it fully.
A native of Chile, brought up in Bolivia, and a resident of San Francisco by the age of 15, Zygarewicz holds degrees from Loyola University, New Orleans, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
She is also an engaged mother of four who homeschools her children, carves out time for considering the world around her, and feels compelled to creatively approach ordinary tasks as raw material for art making.
Seeing her installation, “A Thousand Threads,” in the intimate, oval gallery on the first floor of the CAC, 900 Camp St., may cause a genuine hand slap to the head of the casual observer followed by the words, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The answer, of course, is that the act of making art, evolves from concept, from observation, from intuition, and from an ability to use process to make the thought real, spatial, tangible, even if it is not permanent.
Perhaps one intriguing difference between this artist and everyone else is that she sees dryer lint and recognizes possibility.
In the case of “A Thousand Threads,” we recognize all of the parts.
Those are, indeed, tea bags, stained with the residue of subtle color left by the leaves of plants which have been used for thousands of years, in many cultures. How many times have we seen them, yet, never with the same degree of attention we pay to them as natural light pours over each suspended layer.
They are arranged in sequence – time passing as the artist drinks her tea in the moments of her day carved out for quiet introspection. The dates on the tags document not only the artist’s activity, but also that of the viewer who tends to move with the sequence.
And let’s not forget the threads. Arranged in purposeful ways, they create delicate shapes within the space which seems changed with the vantage point as the viewer ascends the circular ramp to the second floor. It is a moving experience controlled by the sensibility of the artist.
Zygarewicz is steadily gaining recognition for her work. She has exhibited her sculptures and installations across the United States, recently participating in Nola Now: Part I: Swagger for a Lost Magnificence as well as exhibitions in Staple Goods Gallery, New Orleans. In 2011 she received the highest award in The Southern Open, the annual juried exhibition presented by the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette.
Perhaps one intriguing difference between this artist and everyone else is that she sees dryer lint and recognizes possibility.
Visit the CAC through June 2 to see ‘A Thousand Threads,’ an installation by sculptor, Luba Zygarewicz. For more information, go to http://www.cacno.org or visit http://www.lubazygarewicz.com.
Linda Dautreuil is a painter and freelance community writer on Louisiana arts and culture. She may be reached at dautreuil.linda@gmail.com
Only The Best – 11/28/11
Sometimes the best things in life are cultivated: wine, relationships, a good story, an art collection. Cultivation has been on my mind quite a bit these days and even more so since I recently participated in a panel discussion about collecting art in New Orleans. I came home after the panel and re-watched the inspiring documentary about one of America’s most famous pair of collectors, Dorothy and Herb Vogel. The story of the Vogels is seemingly unreal. The couple began buying art in the 1960s in New York City on the modest salaries they made as a librarian and a postal worker. Decades later, after many years of research and investigation, they had accumulated one the most important collections of contemporary art ever amassed. Their only rules were that it had to fit into their small one bedroom Manhattan apartment and that it had to be affordable. It is doubtful that a collection such as the Vogels could be compiled in today’s inflated art market, making their story even more fascinating.
Luba Zygarewicz. Detail, Petrified Time: 12 years, 4 months, and 15 days of my life folded and neatly stacked, 2011. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tom Macom
I’m particularly interested in the ways in which artists collect. Not only art, but objects that serve as creative fodder or materials for art production. In New Orleans, the accumulation of “things” seems commonplace and yet, it is a complete mystery to me why so many people in one community would hold on to such an insane number of objects when the possibility of them being damaged or displaced is overwhelmingly likely. Several artists inSwagger for a Lost Magnificence have created works that have taken many months, if not years to create. Others are accumulations of many individual objects to make one whole. Luba Zygarewicz’s Petrified Time: 12 years, 4 months, and 15 days of my life folded and neatly stacked, 2011, as the title indicates, was a very consuming endeavor. Her use of dryer lint (as well as tea bag tags in a previous piece) brings to mind the work of Tom Friedman, well known for his transformation of commercially produced items such as sugar cubes and toothpicks into elaborate geometric sculptures. Zygarewicz’s use of personal detritus, however, points more to issues of domesticity and the passing of time, rather than a direct comment about consumerism. This sculpture would have been a fantastic companion to many of the works presented in the group exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2006, Altered, Stitched and Gathered (including Friedman, El Anatsui, Shinique Smith, amongst others), which brought together artists “exploring or transforming familiar objects and social practices through a deliberate methodology.”
Robin Levy. Threshold, 2011. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tom Macom
Robin Levy. Detail, Threshold, 2011. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tom Macom
Robin Levy’s Threshold, 2011 confronts the viewer with the evidence of an action that has taken place over an extended period. Using her body to wear away her studio floor (with assistance from gravity and a bit of sandpaper), the artist has pushed herself and the wooden plank that demarks the center of the space to their limits. Like Carolee Schneemann’s infamous Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976, Levy’s action in the most literal sense, transforms the body into a medium for mark making. It is impossible to engage in this conversation without recalling Ylves Klein’s use of the female body as a paintbrush, but Levy and Schneemann, reclaim their own bodies, in complete control of the evidence they are imparting. Made in solitude and ultimately a reflective, almost meditative endeavor, Threshold speaks to the fragility of a life lived and the possibility that it may crumble or fall apart at any given moment.Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976. Courtesy P.P.O.W., New York
Curling In On Itself, 2010, an installation of hand-carved relief prints mounted on Sari fabric was created by Teresa Cole for an exhibition in Kolkata, India. Patterns are repeated and reworked throughout the piece and together the unique individual parts become one powerful organic mass. With this piece and several other recent works, Cole’s two-dimensional prints assume a three-dimensional quality, making the viewer’s body an integral component of their presentation. Hanging so that one walks right into the installation, viewing Curling In On Itself, is a physical experience as much as an aesthetic one. Not only did this piece take a significant time to produce, it also requires a substantial amount of time to install. Cole’s system of hanging the prints with paperclips and colorful string was devised for its presentation in India. The piece has been modified slightly to accommodate the corner of the gallery at the Contemporary Arts Center, hovering just above the floor, creating an imposing presence upon entering the exhibition. Each piece has been curled and over time, the title also becomes its description. Like Levy’s Threshold, it emphasizes a state of being that could unravel with even the slightest gesture.
Teresa Cole. Curling In On Itself, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Bienvenu, New Orleans. Photo: Tom Macom
Teresa Cole. Detail, Curling In On Itself, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Bienvenu, New Orleans. Photo: Tom Macom
Michele Basta works in a range of mediums. Her stop-animation video, Arachne, 2009 merges sculpture, installation, and photography through a compilation of thousands of digital images. Drawing on the history of Surrealism and recalling the work of Avant-Garde filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Luis Buñuel, Basta’s video brings to life an otherworldly creature. According to Greco-Roman mythology, Athena turned a talented weaver named Arachne into a spider when she refused to pay tribute to the gods and acknowledge the source of her great skill. Arachne invites the viewer into the bizarre journey of this transformation using objects laden with meaning such as skulls, beetles, and flower petals, concluding with a violent act that is simultaneously unsettling and poetic. Louise Bourgeois, whose work often interrogated the depths of the psyche, was also quite fond of spiders, and used them as a symbolic reference for the nurturing, protective role of her mother. The duration of the video is quite short, but the layers of meaning and symbolic gestures are rich, encouraging the viewer to engage in repetitive viewings.
Michele Basta. Video still, Arachne, 2009. Courtesy the artist
Maya Deren. Film still, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Watch Arachne here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96_KRbMrUgU
Photographer Stephen Hilger often captures interior spaces in abandoned buildings or the evidence of urban decay. The three carefully composed black and white photographs included in Swagger for a Lost Magnificence, point to the ephemeral nature of the world around us such as the growth of cat’s claw on the side of a building or the shadow created by a string of pendants. Though seemingly the opposite of Zygarewicz’s stacks of lint or the evidence of a repetitive action as in Levy’s installation, I would argue that what he has captured has perhaps been in the making for many years. It is the incisive eye of the photographer who choses the exact instance to eternally capture the moment.
Stephen Hilger. Highway Overpass, 2010. Courtesy the artist
“Only the best,” the slogan of K & B, a drugstore chain that originated in New Orleans, seems to be a standard of time’s past. Though the many stores that populated the Gulf Coast have come and gone, their legacy remains for those who experienced the stores filled with more inventory than any other of its kind and with a guarantee of satisfaction at every turn. Life in the twenty-first century, however, has become increasingly focused on swiftness and convenience, leaving little space for slowly cultivated objects or ideas. Will we look back one day and contemplate all that has been lost? Well-made objects, beautifully constructed or de-constructed buildings, relationships that have been nurtured over decades, lasting ideas. Or will be simply be moving too quickly to bother with what has past?
Upcoming Exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center
http://cacno.org/visualarts/exhibition/2013/03/a-thousand-threads/
PRESS RELEASE
Coming Soon: March 8, 2013 – June 2, 2013
a thousand threads
Emerge Gallery
Exhibition Opening Reception: Friday, March 8, 6–8pm. FREE Admission
Luba Zygarewicz, “thread – el hilo de mis dias”, 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Artist Luba Zygarewicz attacks the poetics of the Emerge gallery’s oval space, inside and out, with an installation that directly incorporates architectural elements inside the gallery and the railing along the ramp. Utilizing ritual and an abundance of daily markers—the tea bags—she explores and pushes the boundaries between inside and outside spaces as a metaphor for one’s inner life and how that visually transcribes to others.
Artist Bio
Luba Zygarewicz was born in Chile in 1965, grew up in Bolivia, and moved to San Francisco at the age of 15. She received her BA in Visual Arts from Loyola University, New Orleans and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 1990 Zygarewicz married and had two girls a year apart. Upon earning her MFA, the family moved back to Louisiana and has resided in Mandeville since 1998. Soon after, she had two more children adding to her sense of responsibility. She has home-schooled her children since 1996. Zygarewicz says:
“My work is informed by life situations and my daily struggle as a woman to be a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an artist.”
Thus, she gravitates to creating pieces that in time accumulate to a large whole, while daily working a bit a time with mundane materials such as her hair, lint, twigs, cotton, and paper. Drawing from a long family tradition, Zygarewicz has been experimenting with tea bags and the stain they leave behind as a sense of presence they represent while drinking endless cups of tea in the process. Text and words have become an integral part of her work.
Zygarewicz has exhibited across the United States and has received numerous awards and critical recognition for both her sculptures and installations. She recently participated in “Southern Open 2011”, at AcA, “NOLA NOW Part I: Swagger for a Lost Magnificence”, at the CAC; “Women Work Wonders” and “Brother, Can you Spare a Day“ at Staple Goods, and “thread ~ el hilo de mis dias” at AcA, Lafayette, LA.
Emerge Gallery is dedicated to site-specific works by emerging artists.
Thanks to the following for supporting the CAC’s First Floor Initiative: Best Buy, Corporate Realty, Cox Communications, Edward Wisner Donation Fund/City of New Orleans, Ella West Freeman Foundation, Greater New Orleans Foundation, Nola Paint and Supplies—Farrell~Calhoun Paint, Selley Foundation, Aimée & Mike Siegel, SPUN Cafe at CAC
Visual Arts Support
Visual Arts programs of the Contemporary Arts Center are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sydney & Walda Besthoff Foundation. Programming at the CAC is supported in part by our Business Arts Fund Members: Arthur Roger Gallery; Callan Contemporary; Hunt Telecom, LLC; The Law Offices of Matt Greenbaum; LeMieux Galleries; Merrill Lynch; Mignon Faget, Ltd. and Modern Market.
CAC CONTACT | Visual Arts Dept | 504.528.3805 | visualarts@cacno.org