Moxy Studios > Reviews
FSVIEW,
Florida, August 31, 2006
The return of art
The struggling and surviving art scene in
New Orleans
By Darby Price
Flying low over Lake
Pontchartrain, staring out at the placid waters, one may easily
forget that only a year ago, those waters were breaking through
the levees of New Orleans, flooding about 80 percent of the
city.
As Aug. 29 comes and goes, the
citizens of New Orleans are bombarded with the images and
stories of Hurricane Katrina, some of them terrible, some of
them inspiring. The reality of the city is that the people who
were able to come back are trying to rebuild in a place that
often seems lifeless.
"The city has definitely
changed," Tulane senior Lee Pratka said. "It's like
living in a third world country now."
In the midst of the economic and
emotional depression that seems to grip the city, the residents
are reverting back to the one thing that forms the backbone of
their community: art.
New Orleans is known for its art,
be it jazz, the Louisiana-inspired paintings of Edgar Degas, or
even the street performers who dutifully pose as statues or
sing renditions of The Temptations songs.
"We used to vacation here
about a week every year, and we just loved it," Director
of MOXY Studios and artist Joan Cox said. "We loved the
feeling of (the city)."
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2005
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Gambit Weekly, New Orleans, August 1, 2006
Recommended
By D. Eric Bookhardt
Some galleries have all the luck. When
Joan Cox and Mare McCall moved here from Baltimore and opened
an art gallery called Moxy last July, little did they know
Hurricane Katrina would hit a mere few weeks later. Like most
of Magazine Street, Moxy came through the storm intact, and
while surviving the post-Katrina economy hasn’t been
easy, their current show, Night
and Day, marks the anniversary of
the gallery’s opening. Cox says she had wanted to do a
show of paintings set in the nighttime but worried that might
seem “a little too dark,” and then some ambient
strains from Cole Porter’s Night
and Day suggested a solution.
Featuring a mix of local and out-of-state artists as well as
some of Cox’s own canvases, Night and Day celebrates
continuity and the hope of better days ahead.
Gambit Weekly, New Orleans, June 13, 2006
Looking East
By D. Eric Bookhardt
excerpt:
Meanwhile at Moxy Studios on Magazine Street, Geza Brunow's Ghosts,
Oracles and the Beauty of Decay holds sway. A painter born in
Berlin of Yugoslav parentage, Brunow moved to New Orleans in
1999 because "there was magic in the air." His ghosts
and decadent beauty are apparently part of the magic, and
Brunow translates such impressions into colorfully wistful
paintings. Most appear decorative and a little amorphous at
first glance, but not everything is entirely as it seems.
Vessel of the Ancients is a loosely painted and rather
impressionistic view of what looks like an antique pot. Cracked
about the rim and featuring some mottled floral designs, it has
clearly seen better days, but it also has a vaguely sinister
vibe. It seems that, when turned upside down, the vessel
becomes a skull, albeit one that has apparently also seen
better days. Chrysalis is a richly-hued painting of flowers,
apartment buildings, houses and picket fences, all
disproportionate to each other and floating in a florid nimbus
like something Marc Chagall might have dreamed up after a
couple of Pimm's Cups at the Napoleon House. While the larger
paintings are loose, woozy and vaguely hallucinatory, his ink
and watercolor images of local houses reveal a linear precision
that is no less whimsical. Created from memory while evacuated,
they infuse local Victorian shotgun architecture with hints of
ancient Belgrade, Balkan villages and other points East in a
mythic architecture of the mind -- a local neighborhood where
Creole goes global.
Gambit Weekly, New Orleans, May 23, 2006
Personal Chemistry
By D. Eric Bookhardt
We've all heard the stories. The storm
changed everything. It brought out the best in some while
bringing out the demons in others. Such is the nature of
stress. And with so much of the area's infrastructure still
wrecked, it's important to accentuate the positive and help
heal the wounds that are still in evidence all around us. Among
the various groups that played an important role in that
process, the volunteers who came from far and wide have been
truly indispensable.
Shannon Bowley is a Seattle artist who spent the past five
months living in a tent while volunteering at the Emergency
Communities free kitchen in St. Bernard Parish, which by now
has served over 100,000 hot meals. Surrounded by the wreckage
of the community and immersed in the harrowing narratives of
its residents, she must have found it depressing at times. How
to cope? Beyond the immediate satisfaction of taking direct
action through her volunteer work, Bowley also translated her
St. Bernard Parish experience into a series of colorful
paintings (currently showing at MOXY Studios).
Largely abstract but with recognizable elements, her vibrant
compositions reflect a healing process of transforming external
chaos into a colorful kind of internal order.
Abstract art traditionally reflects the
unconscious mind filtered through an artist's craft, but these
paintings also convey echoes of wrecked homes and boats as well
as the cryptic crosses left by rescue teams, amid vivid
abstract swatches of color. For instance, Boats #2 is a
freeform composition in which three skiffs appear adrift in a
sea of crimson punctuated by patches of jungle green and
shocking mauve with oozing drips in a liquid forest topped off
by the barest hint of a faded flag. Another composition, I'm Still Here, is emblematic, a
patchwork of symbolic house and boat forms amid a wilderness of
color. Here Bowley's strategic black voids cause her neon hues
to pop out at you, suggesting something like a psychedelic Paul
Klee. Not all are quite so effective, but the best are
intriguing, employing intense colors in a kind of healing
alchemy. Ever dedicated, Bowley is donating a portion of the
sale proceeds to Emergency Communities.
Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore, April 5, 2006
Great Effects
Exceptional Show of Local Women Artists
Continues Locust Point Gallery's Solid Exhibition Streak
By J. Bowers
excerpt:
Despite the ridiculous name, Femme Effect
II should represent the start of something very promising at
Gallery Imperato, the office-cum-exhibit space that has spent
the past year establishing itself as a reliable source for
quality, cutting-edge work by emerging local artists.
The lion’s share of
Imperato’s sprawling space goes to Cara Ober, a young Maryland Institute College of Art
graduate (and former City Paper contributor) who has continued
to grow and evolve artistically over the past three years while
remaining true to her own unique, collage-esque style. Ober
first impressed at warehouse shows last year, where her
freewheeling, wallpaper-influenced collage canvases and
cooperative work with fellow young painter Julie Benoit stole
the show from a host of male artists.
Since then, Ober has taken her craft to the next level.
She paints from the heart and the hip, imbuing her works with
equal measures of memory and sexual tension. While maintaining
her tendency to toss together crayon doodles, wallpaper
swatches, elegant gold fleur-de-lis patterns, drawings of birds
and flowers, and snatches of text, Ober has given herself free
rein to experiment. These newer works, completed over the past
year, exhibit a willingness to accept her uncanny ability to
make completely disparate elements look somehow interrelated.
Facsimiles of dictionary definitions, airplanes, and neon
yellow flowers have augmented her calligraphic doodle style,
and the pieces have become even more enigmatic and dreamlike.
Often Ober’s lowercase
cursive textual elements betray a sly wit: The sublime
“Salvation” features the legend “evangelist:
maybe you need your pain to accomplish what you do.” Ober
divides her attention between monumental canvases like
“Salvation,” richly coated with layers of paint and
collage, and smaller works on paper. Here, the
“Meshuggeneh Series,” a collection of 12-by-12-inch
collages, comes on like a giddier, more girlish version of
British artist Stanley Donwood, juxtaposing traditionally
“male” images (cowboys, football and baseball
players) with cute, “female” stereotypes (glittery
decoupage birds, hearts, bunnies, images of women doing
housework). There’s nothing terribly deep or earthmoving
about Ober’s work, but its visual appeal is undeniable.
The Georgetowner, Washington DC, February 23, 2005
Art at Results
By John Blee
excerpt:
Results Gallery at Results Gym (315 G
Street SE, 202.669.4226) is one of several alternative spaces
around DC presenting art that is overlooked by commercial
galleries. Here we have an ambitious show with Nathan
Richardson, Joan Cox, and
Marcia Dullum.
Joan Cox is an energetic colorist. Her work is
often based on flowers seen in flower markets and has an
expressionist edge and delivery. It is never purely decorative
and she is willing to take on subject matter that could throw
another painter such as an up-close, oversize face sucking on a
straw. Cox’s "Sweet Pears" have the sweetness
of the title. Her "Violette" is jumpy and fun.
Gary Fisher, Art Director of the Results
Gallery, who works from the assumption that “there could
be a Van Gogh in any artist exhibiting early promise," is
to be congratulated on his effort. (Through March 27, 2005)
3811 Magazine Street • New
Orleans, Louisiana 70115 • 504.309.2516 •
mare@moxystudios.com
Located in Uptown New Orleans on historic
Magazine Street between Louisiana and Napoleon Avenues.
Approximately 3 miles towards Audubon Park from Downtown.
© MOXY Studios, LLC 2005