The Front Collective presents 4 solo shows by 3 collective members, Dani Leal, Elliot Stokes and Lily Brooks, and one guest artist, Tiranee Moody:
Survival Mode by Tiranee Moody (Room 1)
Statement:
The reality of an African American woman is restless. In particular, the personal reality of a southern, family oriented, African American woman living away from a place and people she’s always called home, is agonizing. The things that once gave me comfort and stability have assumed a new and unfamiliar face. This work is constantly being created through my experiences in a space where I can’t seem to find a place, or a face that looks like my own. This work is being created as the reality of my blackness kicks in. I’m constantly falling, not completely understanding what I’m tripping over. Then I look down and realize my clothes being ripped off slowly exposing the unhealed wounds caused by the toll of generational curses and strongholds produced by generations of oppression. It is tightly holding me back as I try to break free. I look around at those who look nothing like me, as they walk free. I now understand how my blackness actually fits into a world not created for me or those alike. My training wheels have fallen off, my eyes and ears are uncovered, and now holding on to the sides for dear life is how I survive. This work is an expression of my emotional, physical, and spiritual experience as I survive in the reality of a black woman.
BIO:
Tiranee Moody is a New Orleans, Louisiana native who earned her B.A. in art with a concentration in photography from Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La. She is currently a third year MFA student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. Moody’s art focuses on family, personal, and human connections. Her current work features personal experiences during a new, self-establishing chapter of life. The purpose of her art is to share the story and likeness of human and personal experiences through a raw and authentic lens that connects us to each other. Moody hopes to use her work to capture images that allow her audiences to experience the emotion and connection within her work.
How To Make Rice by Dani Leal (Room 2)
Statement:
One of the few things not taken from my Abuela when she fled to the US from Cuba in 1962 was her memory, and it’s where her flan recipe lives. At 90, she recited it to me, clear-eyed with extreme precision. Generational stories, traditions, and cultural earmarks are passed down through family lines with hopes they will be preserved for the future. But what form does this preservation take? Traditions can be kept alive in myriad ways, the next generation free to take the reigns, using their current resources and positionality.
Using photography, sculpture, and installation, How To Make Rice presents alternative realities to imagined histories. By recreating familiar food as sculptures, making new photos with a family heirloom camera from the 1950’s, against the backdrop of a portrait of my grandmother’s youth, I challenge audiences to deconstruct their own memories and futures, and to meditate on the possibility that new means to an end can better serve them.
Bio:
Dani Leal is a Latinx photographer based in New Orleans, Louisiana and Miami, Florida. Her practice explores the connection between place and proximity and how their correlation affects feelings of perceived vs owned identity. She has exhibited work at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art as part of PHOTONOLA, and Southeastern Louisiana University. Leal was the Artist-in-Residence at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and a Fall 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.
Letter from a Bellwether by Lily Brooks (Room 3)
Statement:
“All along the white beach up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.”
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 1899
Nearly obliterated by the effects of climate change, Grand Isle is a delicate barrier island off the coast of Louisiana. An essential stop for migratory birds, nestled between miles of salt marsh and petrochemical infrastructure, the island holds on – a vulnerable, wildly beautiful, singular place. More than one hundred years ago, Kate Chopin located her proto-feminist novel The Awakening in this landscape. Desperate for self-determination, Chopin’s protagonist makes a choice to escape the limitations of Victorian-era motherhood, slipping into the Gulf.
Looking into this same water, I simultaneously render and abstract sunlight, waves and sand, staggering my exposures. We all know the fate of this shoreline: its essential ecological habitat, the livelihoods and history of a community–they will also be swallowed by the sea.
What happens when a place is erased? What about a woman? And who will we hold accountable for this loss?
Made in 2021 before and after Hurricane Ida, these images represent a portion of my contribution to collaboration with the artist Kate Greene, of Rockland, ME.
BIO:
Lily Brooks holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art + Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and featured in publications such asThe Oxford American and the Los Angeles Times. She is the 2019 recipient of an Archive Documentation and Preservation Grant from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation for her ongoing project, The Spillway. Her editorial clients include The New York Times, NPR’s Weekend Edition and the Financial Times. Lily teaches as an Assistant Professor of Photography at Southeastern Louisiana University and was recently named an Edward G. Schlieder Foundation Endowed Professor of Environmental Studies and Sustainability. She lives and works in Baton Rouge.
Rivers Echo by Elliot Stokes (Room 4)
Statement:
Rivers Echo is an ongoing installation project exploring humanity’s complex relationship with the Mississippi River. It reflects on the river’s dual role as both creator and destroyer, shaping America’s history, economy, and ecology. This exhibition delves into the river’s role in the extraction and global distribution of petrochemicals, while also addressing its profound cultural and environmental impact. Rivers Echo invites reflection on the urgent need for environmental conservation in the face of climate change, encouraging collective action to preserve the landscapes of Louisiana for future generations.
Rivers Echo spans 2020-2024, traveling up and down the greater Mississippi Basin Floodplain, photographing from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Darkroom prints were made largely in residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson in Nebraska City and The Volland Foundation in Alma, Kansas. Thank you also to Antenna and 912 Julia for providing me help with accumulating materials for this first iteration of a much larger body of work to come.
“I am interested in the relationship one has with landscape, in which unity between body and place exists through one’s labor, and what we are asking of the landscape, a negotiation and a system of transaction. This relationship is found throughout the landscape of southeast Louisiana, where a person can feel the weight of history through the relics of former industries. We believe the places we labor are extensions of ourselves, because they remind us of the blood and toil we’ve expended. And when they’re gone, we feel left behind. I position my artwork between reverence and contempt of industry, to show action and consequence, and how the negotiation is never easy. These artworks examine memory and re-creation, specifically how past history shapes the present and future outlook.”
BIO:
Elliott Stokes (B. 1990, New Orleans, LA.) Stokes received his Studio MFA from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign with a concentration in painting, sculpture and new media. His artwork exists within the gray area of necessity and critique of industrial and agricultural processes and how they reflect past histories and infer future trajectories. Positioning his artwork between reverence and contempt of industry, specifically petrochemicals, Stokes uses this tension as a launching point for cultural examination and introspection. He has exhibited nationally, including Zhou B. Arts Center in Chicago, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. He is currently a member of The Front gallery and collective in New Orleans.
| Featured Artist or Artists: | |
| Daniela S. Leal | |
| Venue Website: | |
| https://nolafront.org/ | |
| Venue address: | |
| 4100 St. Claude Ave New orleans, Louisiana 70117 United States Map It |
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| Venue Phone Number: | |
| (786) 371-7393 | |
| Venue Operating Hours: | |
| Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm | |
| Exhibition Start Date | |
| 12/14/2024 | |
| Exhibition End Date | |
| 01/05/2025 | |
| Will you host a public opening? | |
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| Opening Event Date & Time | |
| December 14th, 6-10pm |
