New Art from New Orleans at Western Exhibitions

Published in Time Out Chicago March 16, 2011

If New Orleans doesn’t leap to mind when you’re asked to name a hotbed of contemporary art, Keith Couser might change your perceptions. After working on Prospect New Orleans, the curator brings three of the biennial’s artists to Chicago—and, thankfully, none of them refer to Mardi Gras, Cajun food or jazz.

Stephen Collier’s airbrushed replica of a giant sand dollar, CROATOAN, mirrors the marker that Roanoke Island’s lost colonists left behind in 1590. On the sculpture’s reverse, tally marks count the number of days it took to plug BP’s Gulf oil spill last year. Drawing on kitsch, early American history and recent threats of self-extinction, the piece almost steals the show, but Collier’s other works weave together mystery and archaeology in more complex ways. His ceramic Purification Clubs, arranged as if they’re on display in an ethnographic museum, evoke an ancient ritual sacrifice. The video Subterranean Symmetry recalls the feeling of finding a long-discarded arrowhead in the woods, and wondering who left it behind.

The palette of Brian Guidry’s abstract paintings (pictured)—full of metallic hues, woodsy greens and stale pinks—suggests a Louisiana swamp. While I love Rachel Jones’s tiny, abstract Here Now paintings, which fall somewhere between cosmic ballet and a Led Zeppelin laser show, her colored-pencil tracings of Civil War–era portraits strike me as more important, tapping into a vast body of Southern history and culture that’s underutilized by artists.