Maybe it was the July supermoon, but this month's St. Claude gallery
openings were very dreamlike. Those who braved the pervasive
somnambulism of the night encountered low budget vision quests like
Susan Gisleson's
Jung Hotel installation at Antenna. Less about Nola's
long gone Jung Hotel than Carl Jung's "collective unconscious," the
show explores how the dreaming mind tends to conflate
personal quirks with cultural memory. Here the walls are lined with
books with peep show portals revealing lurid dream scenes while, on the
floor, a 1960s jukebox features freakishly unfamiliar song titles like
I
Found a Glass Eye in the Dirt attributed to familiar names like Del
Reeves. An array of hanging medallions like souvenir drink coasters
encased in clear plastic reprises iconic Americana in the form of
vintage fashions and Indian chiefs, antique road maps and anatomy class
skeletons, 1920s weight lifters and soft porn starlets, all slowly
sashaying in the gentle breezes of the HVAC vent. It's just another
night at the
Jung Hotel where an antique suitcase filled with
realistically slimy plastic frogs at the entrance prepares us for the
for what lies in store.
The Santa Fe, New Mexico, art collective Meow Wolf's
Moving Still installation at the Front greets us with an Iron Claw
machine filled with plastic dinosaurs. The first two galleries are
dedicated to a history of the collective, and the rear galleries
feature a splendidly meandering environment like a sculptural
recreation of a peyote vision formulated by Werner Herzog and Alejandro
Jodorowsky. But a reflexive search for Klaus Kinski mainly yields dry
ice fog arising from a display case memorial to a deceased cross
dresser, and an intricately cavernous maze of psychedelically hued
lattice constructions, above studded with visionary beasts from the
otherworldly labyrinths that appear only to those who journey by the
light of the supermoon. ~Bookhardt
The Jung Hotel: Installation by Susan Gisleson, Through August 3,
Antenna Gallery, 3718 Saint Claude Ave., 250-7975;
Moving Still: Mixed Media Installation by the Meow Wolf artists collective, Through Aug. 3,
The Front, 4100 St. Claude Ave., 920-3980.
