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February 15 through March 14, 2008
Artists' Reception: Friday, February 15, 2008 from 6 to 9 PM
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Art Access Gallery
The New Orleans Project |
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Local Poet Melissa Bond Spearheads The New Orleans Project
Art Access Gallery is pleased to host The New Orleans Project, a multi-media exhibition, from February 15 through March 14. The exhibit will open on Friday, February 15, from 6 to 9 PM during the February Gallery Stroll.
Although Katrina struck New Orleans in 2006, the city remains in the news in 2008. The recovery process has been slow, despite many amazing volunteer efforts. Citizens are still displaced and living in poverty. The rebuilding of New Orleans is ongoing.
Melissa Bond (Poet), Alice McNamara (Photographer) and Beth Hoffman (Audiographer) present an in-depth, multi-media presentation utilizing photography and audio interviews of New Orleans’ residents, music and performance poetry.
The three friends, after watching the media coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 1n 2006, decided to see what was going on in New Orleans for themselves. They connected with Common Ground, a relief organization and worked pulling moldy sheetrock off support beams. They helped a woman in New Orleans East go through the remains of her completely destroyed home in hopes of finding some salvageable memorabilia and wandered through the Ninth Ward and Lakeview, New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish and talked with anyone and everyone they saw.
They listened to people’s stories while dancing Zydeco at the Rock and Bowl, while eating barbeque shrimp poboys at Liuzza’s, and while shopping at Terranova’s grocery.
Selected from hours of audio interviews, innumerable photos and a host of passionate poems, the artists blended art forms in the belief that simple journalistic renderings are incapable of capturing the complexity involved in the aftermath of Katrina.
Melissa Bond says, “ This project aims to provide educational content in an entertaining and artistic way. The combination of art forms conveys the complexity of the situation that was in Louisiana and still is, two years later, and relates the personal stories of individuals in a way the national media has been unable to do in single media formats.”
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Access II Gallery
The State Street Project: A Portrait of Utah
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 Art Access II Gallery is pleased to show a mixed media exhibition titled The State Street Project: A Portrait of Utah. This exhibition, featuring eight artists, will hang from February 15 through March 14. The Opening Reception will take place on Friday, February 15 during the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll.
The State Street Project attempts to present a portrait of the state of Utah at the intersection of historical documentation and personal self-expression. Namon Bills, Steven Stradley, Justin Wheatley, Steph Johnsen, Liz Wilson, Shawn Stradley, Sarah Bigelow & Steven Hardman selected US Highway 89 as a representative cross section of the state and then traveled the length of the road from the Idaho border to the Arizona border. This experience forms the basis for the show.
Each artist's work is based upon individual experience and interpretation. The pieces together form a collective portrait of their experience. Project coordinator Namon Bills explains, "The experience was unique not one of traveling from point A to point B, but of traveling the road for its own sake. Our visual narrative finds itself at the intersection between personal visual experience and physical-temporal space. From the metropolitan areas of the Wasatch Front to uncluttered landscape, from the slow county seats of central Utah to the red rock tourism of Kanab, we experienced the state in its glory and beauty, its ugliness and grit, its shining suggestions of progress and timeworn relics of the past."
The State Street Project will be shown in various additional venues throughout the state during 2008, including Bountiful/Davis Art Center, Juniper Fine Arts Gallery in Kanab, the Springville Museum of Art and the Alliance for the Varied Arts in Logan. Additional shows are pending.
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