SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA JURIED STUDENT EXHIBITION
Juried by Anna Mecugni
June 10 – July 8, 2017
Opening reception June 10, 6:00 – 9:00pm
The Fourth Annual Southeast Louisiana Juried Student Exhibition, organized by PARSE NOLA and Loyola University New Orleans, includes work by 13 students from 5 universities across the region. Juried by Anna Mecugni, PhD, the exhibition runs from June 10 to July 8, 2017 at the Second Story Gallery of the New Orleans Healing Center. The opening reception will be held during St. Claude Second Saturday on June 10, 6 - 9pm, with beer provided by Urban South Brewery. Gift certificates donated by Mo's Art Supply and art supplies donated by National Art and Hobby will be awarded to selected artists.
This exhibition brings together work by thirteen undergraduate and graduate students from Loyola University New Orleans, Louisiana State University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. Students from these universities responded to a call for submissions to participate in this edition of the Annual Southeast Louisiana Juried Student Exhibition—the only initiative of this kind open to all students enrolled in colleges and universities in the region.
The works presented here display a striking variety of mediums, techniques, styles, and yet they insistently share similar concerns about the politics of gender and race relations, and hybrid natural-artificial systems. Mediums range from venerable oil painting and photogravure printing—as in the abstract and figurative works by Emery Gluck, Ruth Owens, and Cristina Pando—to computer-based technologies—as in the Virtual Reality interactive installation by Haley Hatfield, the digital inkjet prints by Kelly McMahon, and the animation by Melissa Robertson. Found objects and materials also appear throughout the exhibition: fragmented clam shells and a computer circuit board are incorporated in Karie Cooper’s paintings; bottle caps, cotton wool, and a photo book form Kieron Oliver’s suspended sculptures; a severed broom and an old, torn newspaper picture appear in Trent Pechon’s assemblage, Double Standards. Everyday life surfaces not only through these physical traces, but also in the imagery and subjects of several works, as in Randi Major’s documentary photographs, Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf’s sculptural diptych on the affective implications of the popular dating app “Tinder,” and Hatfield’s homage to the Black Lives Matter movement in Urban Illusions. A fascination with nature and the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the artificial is evident in many other works, including Isabella D’Amico’s wire sculpture, Lilith Winkler-Schor’s Give and, and Cooper’s paintings, which evoke topographic maps as well as geodes. Indeed, the more time one spends in the gallery looking at the works, the more one discovers connections between them.
Selected artists include: Karie Cooper, Isabella D’Amico, Emery Gluck, Haley Hatfield, Randi Major, Kelly McMahon, Kieron Oliver, Ruth Owens, Cristina Pando, Trent Pechon, Melissa Robertson, Zoe Blair-Schlagenhauf, and Lilith Winkler-Schor.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Anna Mecugni is an independent curator and scholar based in New Orleans. She holds degrees in art history from the Università degli Studi di Bologna in Italy and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as The International Journal of the Humanities and Palinsesti:Contemporary Italian Art On-Line Journal, as well as trade publications including the 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition catalogue, Art in America, and artforum.com. Most recently she contributed as co-editor and author to the scholarly catalogue of the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Ms. Mecugni has taught at Vassar College, Temple University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, the James Gallery at CUNY, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
