No Dead Artists 2012 at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

Long before New Orleans became the emerging artists mecca that it is today, the No Dead Artists expo provided a venue for underexposed talents to be shown in one of this city's leading galleries in an exhibition juried by some of America's most respected curators and collectors. Launched in the mid-1990s by former investment banker turned gallerist Jonathan Ferrara, and long co-sponsored by Gambit Weekly newspaper, No Dead Artists gradually expanded beyond its regional base and now attracts a wide spectrum of entrants from all over the nation. This year's show, which spotlights 12 artists selected from over 500 entries, is no exception and features a cross section of work reflective of the trends and concerns of a new wave of visual artists working in a wide variety of media.

The ecumenical and unpredictable nature of these exhibitions has always had a near oracular quality akin to reading tea leaves as a broad array of concepts, concerns and subtexts rise to the surface in often unexpected new ways. This year it is the role of the individual that is highlighted in relation to an increasingly dense and interconnected world in which people must situate themselves within an ever shifting array of networks, human and electronic, reflecting a time of transition in how people define themselves in relation to their human and natural environment. Consequently our longstanding national myth of the rugged individualist hero is increasingly difficult to perpetuate in an ever more complex, hard wired world dominated by global corporations that are often larger than entire nations. It can now be argued that today's rugged individualists are more often found on the margins of society, or such is the implicit message of Ira Upin's dramatic magic realist paintings such as Fat Cat, in which an aging mobster in shades and puffing on a cheroot reclines in his easy chair as a torched building goes up in flames in the background. But in Jeff Pastorek's paintings the individual subjects appear as tiny portraits arranged in grids that focus on facial features that convey how people express their emotions and desires in relation to each other in a group context, transforming the traditional miniature portrait genre into a kind of painterly social network. In Edward Ramsay-Morin's collages, some photographic portraits of the young adults and couples of the 1950s have been modified so their otherwise conventional Eisenhower-era faces reveal their innermost, cold war decade nightmares in the form of strategic military maps, ICBM missiles and mushroom clouds.

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Globalization, climate change and the sheer vastness of institutions both private and public provide challenges as well as new venues for personal expression, but nature itself is still the ultimate arbiter of human events. In Ayano Hisa's haunting photographs of Japanese schools devastated by an earthquake, the apocalyptic scenes of half destroyed classrooms evoke the presence of individual students by their absence as rows of ruined desks stand shrouded in dust lit by the glare from blown out windows. Related sensibilities appear in Adam Void's collages of cardboard signs like those employed by Occupy demonstrators exhorting protest or indigent panhandlers soliciting spare change. Here there is no trace of any living person yet their voices appear in the form of mute yet graphically emphatic makeshift messages.

Writing takes a more eloquent twist in Raine Vasquez's neon sculpture of the phrase I Remember Facts rendered in glowing glass tubular script. Intended as a comment on the inherent paradoxes of language, this complements other minimalist neon works that blur the boundaries between spatiality and inscription, suggesting that individual identity exists somewhere in the margins between those ubiquitous facets of everyday existence. No less linear, and no less universal, are Nikki Rosato's figure studies precisely cobbled from road

maps of state and federal highway systems. In Connections No. 1, right, the silhouettes of two figures, male and female, face each other squarely as psychic connections depicted as interstate highway systems connect the energy centers of the heart, mind the more personal parts in a kind of endocrine superhighway of tentative longing. But in the works of artists such as Aaron Raymer systems of interconnectivity are paramount while actual individuals are reduced to data as a pervasively wired world tracks their every move electronically. Similarly, Samuel Provenza's Point Study series of abstract sculptures blend modernist and digital systems of abstraction with hints of old Byzantium in linear sculptures that terminate in spires like miniature onion domes and tapered minarets, a reminder that the mysteries of the past are always with us. And Derrick Velasquez's minimalist vinyl and mahogany sculptures explore the stresses and paradoxes of the built environment as technology assumes unexpected psychological dimensions that can take on a life of their own.

Those concerns are amplified in the hand drawn animations of Tadashi Moriyama, above, whose works explore the increasingly hive-like nature of urban existence in the complex cubicles that people occupy in large urban centers. Hinting at a future dystopia defined by vast urban sprawls, Moriyama questions the sustainability if infinite industrial growth. Systems of hive-like complexity appear on a relatively large scale in Abhidnya Ghuge's installation, Halls without walls, rooms to feel In. The door awaits, your return within (below). Inspired by the cellular systems of the natural world, Ghuge deploys various print making techniques on hand made paper plates that she assembles into reef like forms suggestive of sponges or shellfish clusters or improbably massive wasp nests. It is all about home and how creatures large and small situate themselves within their environment as well as psychically within themselves. This process of situating oneself within routinely shifting conditions is common to all life forms and Ghuge's meditative immersion in this most fundamental of creative processes offers intuitive insights and even intimations of solace.

This 2012 No Dead Artists exhibition is its 16th consecutive iteration since it was inaugurated in 1995 as a platform for artists to attain the recognition they deserve in this life rather than having to settle for posthumous success. It was juried by Andy Warhol Museum Director Eric Shiner, Volta Art Fair Basel and New York founder Amanda Coulson, and well known New Orleans art collector and philanthropist Tommy Coleman. ~D. Eric Bookhardt

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