Congratulations, Lea Barton!

LEA BARTON RECEIVES MISSISSIPPI ARTS COMMISSION FELLOWSHIP

Cole Pratt Gallery is proud to announce that artist Lea Barton of Flora, Mississippi, recently won a $4,400 grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC). With her new award, Lea will continue to explore her mixed media technique.

Lea Barton combines collage and paint with photography and printmaking techniques to create richly layered works exploring the material and political history of the South, and dissecting female stereotypes of Antebellum and contemporary Southern culture. The work reflects both Barton’s childhood memories of growing up in Mississippi, and her efforts to define what it means to be from the South. Barton’s solo exhibitions include Cole Pratt Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Denise Bibro Fine Art, New York City, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL.; and the Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA, among many others.

The Mississippi Arts Commission is a state agency serving residents of the state by providing grants that support programs to enhance communities; assist artists and arts organizations; promote the arts in education and celebrate Mississippi’s cultural heritage. Established in 1968, the Mississippi Arts Commission is funded by the Mississippi Legislature, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Foundation, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi Foundation, Donna & Jim Barksdale, the Phil Hardin Foundation, the Mississippi Endowment for the Arts at the Community Foundation of Greater Jackson, and other private sources.

Kathy Hughes, "The Random Nature of Things"

Throughout July, Cole Pratt Gallery will exhibit a new series of mixed-media encaustic panels by New Orleans artist Kathy Hughes. Fourteen wooden panels comprise The Random Nature of Things—a show united by its cool color palette and soft surface textures. Hughes combines chaotic elements of the New Orleans cityscape with gestural drawings and geometric motifs to issue forth a seemingly “random” vision of our city. The exhibition continues through August 2, 2009.

With both mnemonic shapes and recognizable forms, Hughes tells a story of New Orleans. Houses, boats, and bicycles complement sidewalks, oak trees, and telephone wires, but the shapes are out of order; everything floats freely in space, defying gravity and discombobulating the eye. Yet even as the artist toys with entropy and disorder, her work is somehow grounded in inconspicuous horizontals and grids. Colors also play a role in Hughes’s struggle between chaos and stability as muted tones of lavender and blue calm the eye and evoke the silence of dawn.

The Random Nature of Things is surprising work from Hughes, the self-proclaimed “OCD” artist, who is most well-known at Cole Pratt Gallery for her orderly, mixed-media grid constructions. Hughes pushes herself to juxtapose a need for order with her appreciation of the unavoidable chaos that many New Orleanians have come to know well. An avid triathlete, Hughes finds inspiration from her daily, long-distance treks around town. She offsets fine-line sketches against the thick, surface level brushstrokes of encaustic, and she leads us to question how order and chaos coexist in everyday life.

To view this exhibition, go to our webpage at: www.coleprattgallery.com

Katie Rafferty: Street Vernacular

Cole Pratt Gallery presents Street Vernacular, an exhibition of mixed media monotypes and canvas works by local artist Katie Rafferty. The artist’s richly variegated works feature familiar glimpses of local scenery through her abstract layers of collage, paint and gestural marks. Opening reception will be held Saturday Jun 6th from 6-8 pm, and the exhibition will continue through June.

New Orleans is a city built on imperfections; and those who really love the city, love it for its innumerable quirks. Katie Rafferty’s work is inspired by her beloved, idiosyncratic home which provides her with a surfeit of material to employ in her art. For Street Vernacular, she has drawn from local architecture to create abstracted cityscapes that hint at familiar shapes and subjects. This includes elements indigenous to the city: shotgun houses, urban skylines, ornate architectural details, certain flora and fauna, local graffiti and crumbled sidewalks. In House and Garden – and Sidewalk Chalk the artist weaves together lacey, multicolored scribbles around a silhouette of New Orleans’s iconic shotgun house. For Street Vernacular, Rafferty takes the bad with the good, the interesting with the banal, and calls it all beautiful.

Anxious to achieve a unique look for her series of monotypes, Rafferty invented her own printmaking technique. To echo the results of an engraving, the artist applied layers of wax into her plates and carved into the malleable surface, leaving empty space to hold pigment. After exhaustive experimentation, she was able to master a process that can simulate the effects of both monotypes and engravings while duplicating the fleshy, lush surface of encaustics. In addition to the etched wax plate, Rafferty has continued to incorporate mixed media, like lace, blueprints and handmade stencils, into her work. The layered image is transferred directly to paper by way of a press, producing a single print on which Rafferty will continue to draw and collage. Rafferty’s intricate process of amassing and mixing various media produces a richly complex surface, and though singular elements can seem primitive or child-like, the whole is unquestionably elegant.

View the exhibition here