December 12, 2015- January 3, 2016

Opening reception Saturday December 12th, 6-10pm

Means, Motive, Opportunity

A four-room photography show group-curated by The Front artist collective features works by Justin Baker, Angela Berry, Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Lee Deigaard, Sam Feather-Garner, Edna Lanieri, Jennifer McClure, Cristina Molina, Alex Podesta, Akasha Rabut, Claire Rau, Erik Schubert, Matt Shain, Mitchell Soileau, Jonathan Traviesa, John Isiah Walton, and Ryn Wilson.

Detective, culprit, innocent bystander, false witness. Opportunist, victim of misadventure, lucky guesser. Inciter, corrupter, seeker. Artists with cameras pursue the red herring, concoct alibis, and find incriminating clues. 

Justin Baker
http://justintbaker.com/              

Angela Berry

False Notes is a silent score, a historical re-mix, and a re-surveying project. Beginning in 1849 with an article from the Daily Alta, on Monday, March 17, 1851, titled "The Indian War," the article is read, recorded, and converted into a score. These ghost notes precede one of the most important collaborations of the 19th century. The United States Geologic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel (1867-1869), conducted by “Geologist-in-Charge,” Clarence King, and photographed by Timothy O'Sullivan, made the American landscape intelligible. King’s belief in a hybrid theory of Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism (Punctuated Equilibrium), combines the abrupt and gradual changes in the Earth’s surface. The contemporary moment appears to have made peace with the idea of a pre-human history. As we gain proximity to a post-natural, post-human history, a collective catastrophic psychology re-surfaces. The transparent, descriptive project of geology, photography, and history are re-framed between past and present in transparency slides. The viewer is invited to create their own investigation. 

Angela Berry is a member of The Front and is currently living in the Bay Area, pursuing an MFA (’16) / MA in Visual & Critical Studies (’17) at the California College of the Arts (CCA). She is the 2014 / 2015 and 2015 /2016 recipient of The Bernard Osher Foundation Scholarship at CCA. 

Carlos Jiménez Cahua
http://carlosjimenezcahua.com/

Carlos Jiménez Cahua (b. 1986, Lima, Peru) received an A.B. from Princeton University and an M.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He has had solo exhibitions at Samsøñ (Boston, MA), Princeton University and Anastasia Photo (New York, NY). He has participated in group exhibitions most recently at Artspace (New Haven, CT), SPACES (Cleveland, OH), Hap Gallery (Portland, OR), the Courtauld Institute of Art (London, UK), and the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art (Durham, NH). His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and Artforum. Jiménez Cahua has participated in multiple residencies including sübSamsøñ (Boston, MA), I-Park Foundation (East Haddam, CT), and Workspace Residency (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY). He is based in New York, NY.

Lee Deigaard
http://leedeigaard.com/

Lee's work explores animal protagonists and the emotional spaces and physical landscapes where humans and animals co-habitate. Circulatory systems, ecological processes of flow, immersion, and convergence inform much of her work.

Her series of nocturnal photographs of animals won the Clarence John Laughlin Award and was featured in a solo show at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2014.

Her immersive video and sculptural installations have been shown at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, the Acadiana Center for the Arts, and the Alexandria Museum of Art. As a Southern Constellations Fellow and artist-in-residence at Elsewhere, she invited horses to explore a museum housed in a former thrift store. Her work has been featured on National Geographic's blog PROOF.  Her show of drawings and photogenic drawings "Delta and the Hippocamp" at Loyola University's Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery is on view through December. Some of her curations at The Front include the group shows "PhotoBOMB", "You Beautiful Bitch", "Latin for Crab", and "Digital Native."

Sam Feather-Garner
http://samfeathergarner.com/

Sam Feather is a dreamer and "yes-man" who appreciates leisure. A "talented amateur", Sam enjoys "street photography," writing, filmmaking, woodworking, bicycling, and musical instruments. He is “interested" in "the poetry of everyday life," and the “dismantling" of "the man." He favors the “informal economy”  and a “pleasant climate.” 

I want to make honest photographs that capture the beauty of a moment without interfering with it too much. I’m curious about how a place and culture can be investigated or described through its objects and artifacts, its built environment, and their decay. My photos are meant to be humorous, empathetic, and painterly. 

Edna Lanieri         
http://eddielanieri.com

Edna (Eddie) Lanieri, originally from Long Island, is a New Orleans based artist where she teaches photography at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her work has been exhibited both nationally, and internationally, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, London, and Tokyo.

Cristina Molina
http://www.cristinamolina.com/

Cristina Molina was born and raised in Miami, FL and is a recent transplant to New Orleans where she is an artist member of The Front, and Assistant Professor of New Media and Animation at Southeastern Louisiana University. Molina's work investigates interpersonal experience as it relates to the sensorial and psychological. Cristina Molina's work has been exhibited regionally and abroad including: El Palacio de Bellas Artes in the Dominican Republic, Proyecto 'Ace in Buenos Aires Argentina, Makii Masaru Gallery in Tokyo, North Miami MOCA, Frost Museum of Art in Miami, Harn Museum of art in Gainesville, Girls Club Collection in Ft. Lauderdale, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans.

Jennifer McClure
http://www.jennifermcclure.com/

“When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work. It's like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning.”      Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

I’ve been afraid of letting go of the life I was programmed to live. I was taught that having a family and a home and a church and a regular job, all good Southern values, meant that I was successful. My own family life was difficult and displaced, not something I wished to reproduce. I am distrustful of both people and the idea of the American Dream. I’ve avoided any of the rites and rituals that signify “success” but failed to replace a broken mythology with any other. These pictures come from that emotional space of longing, of wishing for things that never were and might never be.

Jennifer McClure is a fine art and documentary photographer based in New York City. After acquiring a B.A. in English Literature, Jennifer began a long career in  She returned to photography in 2001, taking classes at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography. She was named one of LensCulture’s Top 50 Emerging Talents of 2015 and awarded CENTER's Editor's Choice by Susan White of Vanity Fair in 2013.  Her work has been exhibited in shows across the country and featured in Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, L'Oeil de la Photographie, The Photo Review, Dwell, Adbusters, and PDN.
 

Alex Podesta
http://www.alexpodesta.com/

I was born in North Carolina and got taller in Virginia. As an adult, I became a life-long child of New Orleans. My more formative artistic study took place at the Governor’s Magnet School for the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of New Orleans, where I earned an MFA.

In all of my recent work I have culled the rich fantasies, daydreams, misconceptions and experiences of childhood and re-contextualized them through the filters of adulthood, experience and education. This effort has been made in an attempt to plumb the depths of the creative and comprehensive naiveté of youth; to illustrate, in engaging and serio-comic ways, the role of fantasy, “othering” and conflict in nascent self-awareness; and, through the time honored tradition of solipsistic navel gazing, to pick gently at the loose thread of wistful escapism inherent in a quiet, down hill slide into maturity.

The central character in my works is usually found lost in a reverie of industriousness, paired with doppelganger or other machinations of his childish imagination. In concert, these figures toil at understanding, through experimentation or illustration, existential perplexities ranging from possibly surmountable commonplaces – e.g. What is loneliness and how is it combated? – To metaphysical impossibilities – e.g. Who is this god dude? And is he a hero? Like Superman? Or soldiers? Or knights on horseback? And what does hero mean anyway? Of course, no traction will really ever be gained with these pursuits. These boys and toys and bunny/man chimera will be forever locked in the Sisyphean toil of misapplication, miscomprehension and misunderstanding.
 

Akasha Rabut    
http://www.akasharabut.com/

Akasha Rabut is a photographer based out of New Orleans. Her personal work explores the sub cultures that intersect at second line parades. Her work has been published in various publications including ESPN The Magazine, Bust Magazine and most recently stolen by Vice. Some of her clients include Nike and rapper J. Cole.

Claire Rau
http://www.clairejanerau.com

A founding member of The Front, Claire Rau was born in Sandusky, Ohio and raised in northeast Tennessee.  She completed her graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and presently teaches foundations at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.  She is the recipient of several awards and residencies, while continuing to build upon an extensive exhibition record in the US and internationally.

Matt Shain

http://www.matthewshain.com/

Matt Shain (b. San Francisco) lives and works in Los Angeles. He works primarily in the medium of photography, creating work that is both a reflection of the phenomenological world and on the medium itself. He has a BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California at Riverside. Matt has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, Chicago and New Orleans. His work is in the Special Collections of Rivera Library at UC Riverside and has been published in several journals, such as the Humble Arts Guide to Emerging Photography, Harpers Ferry Review (ASU Press) and Stop Smiling Magazine.

My photographic practice has many anchor points, but revolves generally around the idea of the photograph as a paradox or set of paradoxes, particularly in relation to space and time.  We experience both of those phenomena fluidly, but photography abstracts them by only depicting a fragment of each. What is depicted in the image would not exist without the image, and yet the photograph is an index of that very moment in space and time. Or in the words of the photographer Henry Wessel, “photographs are about something that would not exist without the photograph.” With this overarching concern in mind my approach to image making becomes a kind of philosophical investigation asking questions not only of the medium but of the nature of our existence in relation to the image.

Erik Schubert

http://erikschubert.com/ 

Erik Schubert (b. Omaha, NE) received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and his BFA from Columbia College, Chicago. Schubert has taught photography at MassArt, Greenfield Community College, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In November 2013 Schubert released his first photo book How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013). Schubert has been in several exhibitions nationally and internationally. Most recently Re-Frame Memory a Photobook Exhibition at the Athens Photo Festival. Schubert is represented by Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA. Currently, he is the Senior Curation Manager at VSCO.

Mitchell Soileau   
http://mitchellsoileau.com/   

When I was much younger, I realized that photography was a way to enable people to see anything from my point of view without my having to explain through words.  I’ve always documented different changes in my life by shooting my experiences and surrounding environments during these major shifts and changes.  The entire process has resulted in a body of work that allows me, as well as others, to look back and remember what I felt at the time as well as how my view of the world has changed with age.  These two photos are a small piece in this evolving body of work.

Mitchell Soileau received his BFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design before working as production manager for photographer Joyce Tenneson for four years in New York City.  In addition to the state of Louisiana, Mitchell’s personal work has been exhibited in New York City, Brooklyn, and Savannah, Georgia.  Mitchell currently works as the media arts department chair at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.        

Jonathan Traviesa
http://www.postmedium.com/jonathantraviesa
 

John Isiah Walton
https://www.facebook.com/john.isiah?_rdr=p

B 1985

Born in New Orleans he is a current member of The Front , co-founding member of Level artist collective & former co-founding member of Second Story Gallery .He has shown in New York, Austin, Tx, Los Angeles, North Carolina & Tokyo.

Ryn Wilson
http://rynwilson.com/

Ryn Wilson is a multi-media artist living and working in New Orleans. She received her BFA from the University of Milwaukee, WI and her MFA from the University of New Orleans. Her work revolves around creating fictions within systems, such as museum displays or film tropes, as a way to re-evaluate the accepted interpretations of our invented world. She employs a variety of mediums such as photography, video, painting, drawing collage and sewing. She works as a photographer and costume designer and is a member of the artist collective, The Front. Her work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg, Innsbruck, Oslo (Oslo Screen Fest), Vallensbaek (DIAS), San Francisco, Austin, Milwaukee and New Orleans (CAC).