October 10- November 8th, 2015
Opening reception Saturday October 10th, 6-10pm
Please sign up early to experience George Ferrandi’s Star!Star!Star!Circle! opening night at:
Star!Star!Star!Circle! NOLA
First performance begins at 6pm.
Room 1:
Stacey M. Holloway
Rough Draft
We all have an innate desire to belong and to love, to form intimate relationships and strong emotional connections, yet our hopes, dreams, and desires are not always realized. ROUGH DRAFT explores the uncertainty of a future and how quickly one small decision can unintentionally alter an intended plan. In this series of work, I analyze indecision as a present, uneasy circumstance. I use my studies of animal behavior, the landscape, and architectural drafting as mechanisms for metaphors of uncertainty and longing, and through my sculpture build narratives situated at the point between possible success and potential failure.
www.staceyholloway.com
Room 2:
George Ferrandi
Star!Star!Star!Circle!
**PARTICIPATION REQUIRES ADVANCE REGISTRATION**
Audience involvement is a crucial part of this short interactive piece.
The first live performance for an audience of 8 people begins at 6:00 pm.
Additional later shows will be made available as earlier shows fill.
Please register at the link below.
Star!Star!Star!Circle! NOLA
It’s a little known fact that the North Star - that fixed point in the night sky that helped lead slaves to freedom in America - is not the same North Star that helped the Egyptians align the pyramids. And because of a wobble in the Earth’s rotation, a thousand years from now, another North Star will replace our current one.
The Front is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by George Ferrandi. Star!Star!Star!Circle! a short but immersive, synchronized sound play to be performed with and for an audience of eight at a time. This work serves as an introduction to the artist’s ideas that have been informed by “axial precession.”
Regarding Star!Star!Star!Circle, Ferrandi writes, “The fact that the North Star - what we literally consider our ‘guiding light’ – changes, is an allegory worth ritualizing. Our faiths falter, our parents die, but we look to a new star. I'm curious about how a transition of that scale will be marked, and think we could begin planning that celebration now.” Ferrandi puts this plan into action by first writing intimate myths to be associated with each of the stars that will eventually become the planet’s North or Pole Star. The sound play functions as an introduction to this cosmological narrative and to each of those nine celestial characters.
George Ferrandi’s works occupy an unusual place within the world of contemporary art. Her diverse actions and varied approaches to material objects often incorporate a tenderness that belies scale, and challenge cultural assumptions. As Elizabeth King observes, Ferrandi’s multi-faceted work “brings a startling humanism and modesty to art’s action in the world.” According to the International House of Japan, “One remarkable aspect of Ferrandi’s work in recent years is her ability to collapse great distances – of time … or between people... The Japanese phrase ‘kuuki ga yomenai’ refers to an inability to ‘read’ the air between people, but Ferrandi… actively works to ‘sculpt’ that very air … In Star! Star! Star! Circle!, this very air, delicately molded within a circle of newly-formed stars, bridging the distances of time, space, and intimacy, is made tangible…”
George Ferrandi was born in Baltimore, and moved to New York on September 10, 2001. She lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is the founder and director of Wayfarers Studio Program in Bushwick/Bedford Stuyvesant. Her work has been performed/exhibited around the country - at Abrons Arts Center and the Kitchen in New York, Cinders Gallery and DUMBO Arts Center in Brooklyn, the McKinney Contemporary in Dallas, the Wexner Center in Columbus, the Harn Museum in Gainesville, and Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. She has been awarded grants from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the Mid Atlantic Arts Council. She is a 2015 Japan-US Friendship Foundation Fellow and is currently developing the multi-media festival, Jump!Star, with Washington Project for the Arts for 2016. Star!Star!Star!Circle! will be performed this summer on the roof of the International House of Japan in Tokyo, and in the fall at The Front in New Orleans. The project is made possible through the generous support of the Japan-Friendship Commission and the International House of Japan.
http://www.georgeferrandi.com/
Room 3:
Lee Deigaard
Equuleus
Horse, land and sky.
The horse watches the horizon. His body activates the landscape. He takes the long view: the movements of sun and stars, the change of seasons, the grass as it grows. A woman gazes, draws near from afar. Alert to even the smallest insect, he senses the dilation of pupils, a flickering emotion, a wavering of intention. Unaware, the woman gives herself away. To know and be known is a wide open frontier.
Equuleus is part of a multi-media long-term project, In Your Dreams [Horses] exploring horse personality and individuality, sensory processing and proprioception, concepts of invitation, initiation, and trespass, and shared thresholds of experience between horse and human.
Lee Deigaard'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 recent artist-in-residence, she invited horses to explore a museum housed in a former thrift store. The video from this event Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere is part of MORE MEDIA: performative/interactive at Tulane University's Caroll Gallery, October 6-28, 2015. Her show of drawings and photogenic drawings Delta and the Hippocamp opened September 29th at Loyola University's Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery and is on view through November.
www.leedeigaard.com
Room 4:
Alex Podesta
Distractions and Follies: New Finished Works in Progress
Recent studies, half-thoughts, and after-thoughts from daily studio practice.
alexpodesta.com