New Art from New Orleans Stephen Collier Brian Guidry Rachel Jones
Organized by Keith Couser
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a three-person group show organized by Keith Couser focusing on cultural production from New Orleans and South Louisiana. Featured are multi-media artist Stephen Collier and painters Brian Guidry and Rachel Jones. The show will open with a reception that is free and open to the public on Friday, February 25 from 5 to 8pm.
Stephen Collier will be showing a new video, ceramics, photographs and collages, works that function as staged archeological finds. A recent sculpture"CROATOAN" is a freestanding, resin/fiberglass-cast sand dollar with an airbrushed beach scene on the front and jail-house hatch marks on the back denoting the number of days it took to plug the BP oil spill. Like the word "Croatoan", Collier's artifacts act as traces of lost settlements and are used to describe what has happened in South Louisiana and other parts of the gulf coast.
Brian Guidry's intricate geometric paintings are seductive - tiny crackles and splintering shiny surfaces trip both modern and antique sensibilities. His paintings come from an interest in an almost alchemical transformation of material. Guidry states "I am interested in the forces and processes that produce and control the phenomena of the material world. The colors I use are sampled from the landscape where I am currently working in South Louisiana. Reflections from water, menacing storm clouds and September's exhausted foliage are among the sources from which I reference." The conversion of observed, natural color to painted color reflects his fascination with humanity's manipulation of nature for consumption - the conversion of raw material to usable material.
Rachel Jones' current paintings, vibrant impasto-ed oils on flexible plastic, hover between landscape, abstraction and phenomenological imagery. Jones will show a series of new small paintings as well as a separate body of work -- sketchy, colored pencil contour drawings of Civil War Era denizens. Jones states "I begin the works by pulling photos and reproductions from public sources, both historical and contemporary. I then distort and abstract the images and use them as casual references. The paintings are executed on cut plastic sheets, and I borrow the crisp, clean borders and layouts from the world of design and advertising."
Exhibition organizer Keith Couser has been involved in Chicago's art community over the past ten years as a fervent enthusiast and for 5 years, the co-owner and co-director of Bucket Rider Gallery. He is a frequent visitor to New Orleans and in 2008 helped to work on the Prospect.1 Biennial organized by Dan Cameron.
