Atmospheric Conditions
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Atmospheric Conditions -|-
Echo, 2023
Atmospheric Conditions opens November 11, 2023 at Staple Goods Gallery, a solo exhibition of mixed media assemblage and incised synthetic rubber on vintage linoleum pieces.
The artworks oscillate between surface and depth where the artist’s marks slice through layers of material accretions built up over lifetimes, Desmarais’s and others. Precise cutlines reveal textures and flashes of color to create flickering views into immersive visual space.
In counterpoint, voluptuous sculptures hold plastic artifacts in suspension to engage the surrounding air. These works move between past, present, and future tense mixing memories of common things with the slipperiness of their new skins. The liquid rubber cleaves found objects and diaphanous fabric together with hardening cohesiveness. The sculptures conceal, stack, and rearrange objects we think we know the shape of. Desmarais encourages us to see the expansive physical world through the timelessness of now.
The artifacts encapsulated in these works have been collected from post-consumer use across North America. They form a record and a mirror.
Yellow No. 2, My Mother’s favorite Color was Yellow
I am honored to be included in Louisiana Contemporary, 2023, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, presented by the Helis Foundation.
This year’s juror, Aleesa Pitcharmarn Alexander, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, has selected 45 works by 31 artists. Three of my new works have been included in the exhibition.
Opening Aug. 5, 2023 and on view through Feb. 18, 2024
I have recently been awarded a Get Ready Grant to re-wire a kiln to a safe and ventilated space extending my studio practice to ceramic work. This project was supported by CERF+ and the Mellon Foundation through a grant administered by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. Beyond the new kiln room wiring, an important benefit has been learning about cerf+ and accessing additional resources supporting artists’ professional practice. To learn more go to https://cerfplus.org/
About CERF+ -- the Artists Safety Net Since 1985, CERF+ has assisted thousands of professional artists working in craft disciplines with emergency financial assistance as well as resources and educational programs for any studio-based artist designed to strengthen and sustain their careers. CERF+ has endeavored to assure the well-being and success of individual artists, but also, through research and advocacy, to advance the needs and status of the craft field in general. CERF+ has developed the expertise and reputation as the “go-to” organization for artists working in craft disciplines. Over this time, CERF+ has become a respected leader on the national arts scene, advocating for improving the overall safety net for U.S. artists before, during, and after disasters through its leadership of the Coalition for Artists’ Preparedness and Emergency Response.
2021 Atlanta Biennial
Read more about the show in the NEW ART examiner, “Other hues of Blue: A Pandemic-Era Biennial in Atlanta” by Tenley Bick
New Work included in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial
February 20, 2021 – February 21, 2021
Since its inception in 1985 and revival in 2016, the exhibition has addressed the deep vernacular traditions at work in the art of the Southeast. The 2021 Atlanta Biennial does this while simultaneously confronting the social issues caused by COVID-19, racism, inequality, and the essential role artists play in our understanding this moment and movement.
Atlanta Contemporary publicly announced the curators, Dr. Jordan Amirkhani (Main Galleries) and TK Smith (Project Spaces) in February of 2020 one month prior to the mandated shelter-in-place announcements throughout the country. Though the intent to commission new work by artists from around our city and region remain, both curators quickly recognized their challenge in navigating the anxiety, grief, and uncertainty brought on by the pandemic and how best to elucidate these collective sentiments.
In keeping with the long-established vision of the Atlanta Biennial, Dr. Amirkhani states: “'this exhibition invites the weight of these cultural murmurations to seep and sow against the range of material and conceptual methods of response available to artists in 2020 ... for what is at stake in this exhibition is whether or not representations can provide adequate responses to the fluctuating conditions and complexities of life lived in the United States.”
All studio visits occurred via Zoom with walk-throughs of the galleries accomplished over Facetime. In short, this was not business as usual. Yet, at the core of this work, the artists, curators, and staff endure the emotional, mental, and physical oppression of this time. We can all agree: the future is uncertain yet as TK Smith promises: “[this exhibition] leaves viewers with new ways of understanding and coping with the ephemerality of material life.”
Art is essential.
Of Care and Destruction
Curated by Dr. Jordan Amirkhani
Located in Main Galleries
excepted from https://atlantacontemporary.org/exhibitions/2021-atlanta-biennial
The Joan Mitchell Foundation is pleased to announce the 32 artists who have been awarded residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans for the coming year. The Artist-in-Residence program has become a vital realization of artist Joan Mitchell’s vision to provide artists with the necessities of time and space to create their work.
Work included in Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans exhibit, Identity Measures, Open Call 2019
At a time of heightened division both at home and abroad, imagining a world of shared experience and solidarity between ideologically opposed groups seems like the stuff of dreamwork. Difference, and what to do with it, remains the most significant question of our era and forces a consideration of the role that identity—or, the representation of the individual “self” through personal idiosyncrasies, language, actions, beliefs, appearance, experiences, and forms of social belonging and/or oppression—plays in grappling with heterogeneity in the sociopolitical sphere.
Identity Measures presents a diverse group of artists working in a range of material practices that engage identity not as a fixed structure, but as an insistently mobile and often resistant assemblage of traits and vulnerabilities. This exhibition is predicated on the understanding that identity is shaped by a variety of historical, racial, gendered, socioeconomic, geographical, physical, and ideological experiences through time. By opening up a dialogue about difference through the language of contemporary visual art, this exhibition claims that one’s structural location in the world matters to the articulation of personal and collective identity—a process that poses itself as a dynamic site of agency, creativity, resistance, visibility, ambiguity, and belonging.
This exhibition is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and curated by Dr. Jordan Amirkhani. Support for this exhibition is provided by Sydney & Walda Besthoff, The Helis Foundation, the Welch Family Foundation, and the Visual Arts Exhibition Fund. This exhibition is also supported by the City of New Orleans through a Community Arts Grant, as well as by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council.
Image by Alex Marks
LOUISIANA Contemporary
PRESENTED BY THE HELIS FOUNDATION
Pink #2, large
OGDEN MUSEUM AUG 4 - NOV 4, 2018
Opening Reception: August 4, 5:30-9:30pm
An annual, juried exhibition that promotes contemporary art practices in the state of Louisiana via the exposition of living artists’ work. The juror for 2018 is Courtney J. Martin, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation.
Tiling Field Shift #3
PieceWork: Art Inspired by the Tradition of Quilt-making
JULY 14-AUGUST 5, 2018
Curated by Cynthia Scott at the Front Gallery, featuring works by:
Anita Cooke, Marianne Desmarais, Abdi Farah, Maria Levitsky, Sadie Sheldon
The Front Gallery: 4100 St. Claude Avenue, New Orleans
Opening Reception: July 14, 6-10pm
Artist Walkthrough July 15, 3pm.
CAC installation view
Shifting Perspectives: Marianne Desmarais at the Contemporary Arts Center
APRIL 6, 2018
PELICAN BOMB'S Marjorie Rawle contemplates how artist and architect Marianne Desmarais’ work, recently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, explores space, form, and perception.