No art exhibition could better bridge the gap between the joyous chaos of Carnival and the quiet contemplation of Lent than “Ersy: Architect of Dreams,” a 40-year retrospective of works by the New Orleans sculptor at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art through Sunday.

As your eyes wander among the toylike bronze figurines in Ersy’s miniature parade “Homage to the Society of St. Anne,” you will naturally smile at the charming costumes and fanciful floats arranged at eye level on a tall custom tabletop.

For a moment, you are a child again, swept up in wonder. But soon you’ll recognize, from the bird skulls, empty doll boots and unlit birthday candles, that Ersy’s whimsical symbolism is clouded with the specter of mortality.

Suddenly you are an adult once more, aware of life’s limited span.

Everywhere in Ersy’s meticulously crafted sculptures, a certain surrealist silliness runs snack dab into the Grim Reaper. Look for the mouse carcass in the Lilliputian bathtub — Ersy’s retelling of David’s “Death of Marat.” Look for the alligator shoes that comically fuse fashion excess and taxidermy. Look for the empty Egyptian-like ship of the dead, suspended in midair among magical Magritte-like umbrellas.s “Oyeme Con Los Ojos (Hear Me With Her Eyes)” exhibit is installed in adjacent galleries. [sic]

Combining Ersy’s sculpture with Josephine Sacabo’s eerie landscape photographs in this part of the exhibit was an inspired touch. The rest of Sacabo’ s “Oyeme Con Los Ojos (Hear Me with Her Eyes)” exhibit is installed in adjacent galleries.

To many in New Orleans, as the season of feasting gives way to the season of fasting, heroic images of classical gods and goddesses are displaced by humble images of the saints.

In Ersy’s exhibit, the saints are everywhere. Look for the sparrow-man pierced with tiny arrows like an avian St. Sebastian. Look for a cabinet that grimly evokes the torture of St. Agatha — the patron of bakers, whose breasts were amputated.

Best of all, behold the stunning craftsmanship in Ersy’s tribute to St. Leger, patron of the blind. Ersy’s sculpture of an anthropomorphic antique camera transfixed on a glass eye is like a scene from the movie “Hugo” come to life.

Ersy, a teacher at The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts since 2000, commands the complex poetry of Crescent City life as well as she commands the materials in her demanding sculptures.

In “Ersy: Architect of Dreams,” the Ogden provides an artistic dream come true.

Ersy: Architect of Dreams
What: A 40-year retrospective of what works by the New Orleans sculptor Ersy Schwartz. The exhibit is paired with the photo exhibit by her friend of 30 years, Josephine Sacabo, called “Oyeme Con Los Ojos (Hear Me with Her Eyes).”
Where: Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., 504.539.9600, ogdenmusuem.org.
When: Today through Sunday. Museum hours are Wednesdays through Mondays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays from 6 to 8 p.m. for Ogden After Hours concert/receptions.
Admission: Adults, $10; seniors $8; children $5; free to Louisiana residents 10 a.m. to 5 Thurs. Visit ogdenmuseum.org.

Renowned artist John T. Scott’s colorful kinetic sculpture captured the New Orleans spirit. In 1992, Xavier University art professor Scott, who lived from 1940 to 2007, was awarded a $315,000 John D. MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a genius grant. It was a career-capping acknowledgement of Scott’s devotion to artistic experimentation and education that made him the city’s most influential modernist. Large-scale sculptures by Scott can be found in DeSaix Circle, City Park and at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Scott’s work frequently reflected African-American themes. One of the best examples of his symbolic style is the silvery work “Ocean Song,” created for Woldenberg Park on the French Quarter riverfront in 1990. Scott said the rings at the top of the sculpture represent the circle dances that were performed at Congo Square by slaves, the wires that bisect the rings are a reminder of the traditional African diddley bow musical instrument and the wind-activated aluminum rods produce visual patterns reminiscent of jazz.

Raised in the Lower 9th Ward, Scott received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Xavier University and a master of fine arts degree from Michigan State University in 1965. His early sculptures were expressive figural bronzes with religious themes, but in time much of his work became more geometric and abstract. In 1983 he traveled to New York to study with internationally known sculptor George Rickey, who inspired him to add mechanical motion to his works.

In addition to three-dimensional art, Scott produced drawings and prints. In 1993 he designed the much-collected New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster. In the early 2000s he created a series of large-scale wood block prints produced with a chainsaw and asphalt roller.

Scott’s 2005 retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art was a professional peak and a swan song. He evacuated to Houston before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. His eastern New Orleans studio was flooded by the levee failures, then looted for scrap metal. While in Houston, Scott was hospitalized with lung disease and received two double lung transplants, but died before being able to return to New Orleans.

Change happens. That’s not news, but lately the pace seems to be picking up in often perplexing ways. Such is the proposition that propels Luis Cruz Azaceta in his Shifting States expo at Arthur Roger Gallery. As a child, the Havana-born painter escaped Cuba in 1960 with his family. Ensconced in Uptown New Orleans for the past 20 years, his lifelong themes of displacement and alienation are as relevant now as ever. Shifting States is an apt title in an age when revolutions are launched with cell phones and enemies are stalked and assassinated by remote-controlled drones. Blood Line (pictured) suggests a Rorschach blot studded with the oddly similar forms of mosques, minarets, radar and microwave towers in a bristling nimbus of potential mayhem. Surveillance is a maze of circuits attached by electronic umbilical cords to lethal-looking pods in improbable candy colors. All sprout ominous appendages and the effect is unsettling, as if economic, religious and military conflicts had assumed autonomous lives of their own in which mere individuals are all but powerless.

Shifting States
Through Feb. 18, 2012
Arthur Roger Gallery, 434 Julia St., 522-1999

AFTER A SERIES OF STOPS AND STARTS, “PROSPECT.2 BIENNIAL” was finally launched on October 22 and will hold forth in New Orleans through January 29, 2012. Organized by Dan Cameron, this is not the same raucous affair as “Prospect.1″ but is instead a more focused and intelligent group show. Whereas Prospect.1 had 81 artists in 24 venues, Prospect.2 is down to 26 artists. Works are displayed at sites throughout different neighborhoods, including the French Quarter, Tremé, St. Claude, the Warehouse District, City Park, and Tulane and Xavier universities. Venues range from museums and college galleries to public spaces and nontraditional exhibition spaces.

If visiting opening-weekend critics had stayed on to see satellite events such as “Music Box” at New Orleans Airlift or checked out exhibits at such local galleries and artist spaces as L9, Good Children Gallery, Antenna and T-Lot, to name a few, they would have had an enhanced awareness of a small but growing and sophisticated artist community in a special Southern city. In what I feel is a bold move, Franklin Sirmans of LACMA has just been appointed to be the artistic director of Prospect.3. Franklin is African American, significant in a city that is 70% African American, and a community not well exposed to contemporary arts. He is replacing Cameron, who, after two years of controversy but also devotion to Prospect, is accepting a position at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Prospect.2 has a number of well-known artists, such as Sophie Calle, Nick Cave, Jennifer Steinkamp and William Pope.L. Cave exhibits works previously viewed elsewhere, while Calle tweaks existing work for her offering. Steinkamp’s new video at New Orleans Museum of Art continues her exploration of change and mutability. Pope.L’s participatory photo-based project, which includes photos from local citizens, worked well only on the opening night, when his back-lit slide show was pulled through the streets on a trailer as a moving light box. Alexis Rockman’s large faux history painting is a florid parable of battling species and could pass for a surreal diorama in a natural history museum. Lorraine O’Grady’s documentary photos of an early performance work at the New Orleans African American Museum are of historic interest. An-My Lê’s delicate photos of the local Vietnamese community contrast with William Eggleston’s black-and-white portraits and strangely compelling video at the Old Mint building.

There is a solid presence of local artists, with colorful and biting representational paintings by Keith Calhoun, Chandra McCormick’s and Calhoun’s distressed photos, and paintings by self-taught artist Bruce Davenport, whose series of New Orleans parades suggests a sophisticated mind at work developing a signature style. Dan Tague at the Contemporary Art Center, presents a rambling politicized installation of elements that suggests an affinity with the Occupy movement. Upstairs, a group show of Louisiana artists gives an overview of artists not included in Prospect.2. In an effort to create a participatory event, Robert Tannen opened his new house on the levee near the Ninth Ward by hanging canvases on the walls and inviting the public to paint on them.

By far, though, the most intriguing and complex work of Prospect.2 is Dawn DeDeaux’s exuberant installation “The Goddess Fortuna and Her Subjects in an Effort to Make Sense of It All” at the historic Brulatour Courtyard in the French Quarter. This complicated mixed-media work is at once quintessentially New Orleans while announcing the presence of an artist who should have a much larger national profile.

The installation theme derives from John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize—winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, famous for its rich depiction of New Orleans and widely viewed as the best and most accurate portrayal of the city in a work of fiction. The title of Toole’s tome comes from Jonathan Swift’s quote “When a genius appears in the world, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” Aptly, the travails of many creative people come to mind. The central character is Ignatius J. Reilly, a kind of modern, transgressive Don Quixote with issues. Reilly, not unlike many artists, feels he is not of this world. To mitigate his human failings, he invokes the Goddess Fortuna, who gives him bad luck and “joo joo” throughout his journey.

Open only at night, DeDeaux’s installation riffs on Toole’s evocation of fate and furies. The artist uses the three-story mansion to great effect. Off each story is a balcony, behind which are French doors and windows. Using various staging setups, including mannequins costumed with dunce hats that look weirdly like figures from the Inquisition, and a room full of masks and odd artifacts, she sets up a fun-house tableau on each floor. There are rooms you can enter and rooms that you view from the center of the courtyard, which boasts a wagon with a fountain that has distinct masturbatory connotations, consistent with the Reilly character. The rooms have video projections or staged lighting, which makes a dramatic impact. Looking up from the grounds of the courtyard, you can see ethereal, spinning videos. In a large downstairs room is a dance video, if one can call it that. DeDeaux cast the contemporary diva of New Orleans bounce music, Katey Red, to play the role of Goddess Fortuna, accompanied by two backup dancers as “the Wheelettes”—to spin the wheels of our fate. The energetic figures in the video have an uncanny optical effect of appearing disembodied in the outdoor courtyard through a device of reflection. I watched entranced through the windows of the room at the courtyard; it was truly disturbing, and inspiring. Worked from its literary source, DeDeaux’s zany, smart and wildly imaginative installation goes far beyond illustration to become an atmosphere that is indeed inhabited by the Goddess Fortuna.

The night I attended, I was alone in the installation and began to feel the spirits move. In this stupendous work of art, all that Prospect.2 could be—a national creative moment, a celebration of New Orleans, a cry for the irrational to inhabit the arts once again—was crystallized.

“Prospect.2 Biennial New Orleans” runs through January 29, 2012. prospectneworleans.org

The Past Still Present: Photographs by David Halliday at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art
On view January 19 – April 8, 2012

A master of light, New Orleans photographer David Halliday, produces lush and elegant images that are both classical and modern. Using window light to illuminate his subjects, Halliday’s direct formal approach offers a fresh take on the historic art prototypes of still life and portraiture. The simplicity of his visual language produces images that transcend time.

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art
University of New Orleans
925 Camp Street New Orleans, LA 70130
504.539.9600

Wednesday – Monday: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Tuesday: CLOSED
Thursday: Museum reopens @ 6pm with live music from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Shifting States: Egypt 2, 2011, Permanent ink on paper, 30 x 30 inches

Luis Cruz Azaceta in New Orleans. From collapsing economies to the consequences of climate change, the instability of global affairs has been, for many of us, a cause of alarm and despair. But for Luis Cruz Azaceta, it’s been a source of artistic inspiration—particularly the way individuals across the world have been rising up to demand change. In Luis Cruz Azaceta: Shifting States, he tackles this ongoing global transition in paintings and drawings that reflect his signature colorful style. The show opened in New Orleans this past Saturday at the gallery Arthur Roger@434, where it’s on view through February 18.

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