The VESTIGES Project: NOLA Visits the ATL
VOTA, 1993, a two-city collaboration between artists in Boston and New Orleans. Photo courtesy the VESTIGES Project.
Dear neighbors,
I wanted to alert everyone to the upcoming lecture at Eyedrum next Wednesday, June 24, from 7-9PM, featuring members of the VESTIGES Project, an artist/writer collective from New Orleans. The talk will celebrate the group’s 25th anniversary and will coincide with Land Marks, a new photography and video exhibition at Opal Gallery, opening the very next night.
The VESTIGES delegation will discuss past collaborations that “investigated sites that are unknown, overlooked, or historically camouflaged, in order to question traditional and commonly accepted ideas of the spectacular.” I’m honestly interested to hear what they have to say: The quotation above suggests a conversation conscious of, but not limited to, the theories of Guy Debord (i.e., the spectacular), but more importantly, the group has moved the conversation out of the abstract and into concrete practice.
Take for example 1993’s VOTA project, pictured above. In an ambitious strategy of reverse camouflage, various “art objects” were frozen in a ginormous block of ice! More from the group’s website:
The project included, courtesy of the Boston participants, the shipping of a one-ton table of ice within which were frozen various artifacts and other assorted gifts, from Boston to New Orleans where it melted in public view at the Contemporary Arts Center while being used to serve chilled raw oysters to the public. In return, the New Orleans participants boarded a plane with their own peculiar and distinctive ‘luggage,’ including suitcases filled with Mississippi River mud in which various artifacts and assorted objects were buried, and proceded to have an interactive installation/exhibition at The Space in Boston.
The VESTIGES discussion also should provide a nice follow-up to Saskia Sassen’s ART PAPERS lecture on globalism and urban visibility.
VESTIGES will be represented by four artists: Courtney Egan, Debra Howell, Jan Gilbert, and Michel Varisco. The lecture will feature an intro by Atlanta-based curator Andy Ditzler, and both the talk and its sister exhibition, Land Marks, are organized by Constance Lewis, owner/director of Opal Gallery.
