
In the next gallery, Claire Rau's Permission installation features apocryphal furniture parts leaning inexplicably against a wall. Replacing Duchamp's “readymades” with improbable hand made objects, Rau quietly yet provocatively questions the meaning of art, craft and aesthetics itself. In Nicole Jean Hill's Artifacts and Incidents landscape photographs, some sculpturally bullet-riddled beer cans--and the skin of a gutted deer seemingly deep in sleep--slyly undermine on our preconceptions of truth and beauty. But Jan Gilbert's 30 Years wall documentation of her own public art projects is a compendium of graphic art about her public art, a visual archive in which a room becomes a monumental resume', a time capsule of an epoch. Meanwhile, in the back yard, Gilbert and Babette Beaullieu's flapping “Cajun” prayer flags seem to celebrate the passing of life's (hurricane) seasons. ~Bookhardt
You Beautiful Bitch: Group Show Curated by Lee Diegaard; Works by Claire Rau and Nicole Jean Hill, Jan Gilbert and Babette Beaullieu Saturdays and Sundays through July 8, The Front, 4100 St. Claude Ave., 920-3980