Baton Rouge Gallery features Kerr, Lemoine and Parker in February

 

Beginning on Jan. 31, Baton Rouge Gallery – center for contemporary art (BRG) will feature the work of three of its artist members: Eleanor Owen Kerr, Kathleen Lemoine and Jacqueline Dee Parker. The exhibition will run through Feb. 25, 2010.

A First Wednesday Opening Reception for these three artist members and their work will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 3 from 7-9 p.m.

Photographer Eleanor Owen Kerr is the recipient of three 2008 LUCIE International Photography Awards and was named a 2006 finalist in the Black and White Spider International Photography Awards. Her work is exhibited annually in galleries in New York, Baton Rouge and New Orleans as well as in juried shows around the country.  Her photographs were on view by invitation to the U.S. State Department’s ART loan program from 2006-2009 to the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa. In 2005, Eleanor completed a Professional Certificate in photography at Rockport College. She also studied privately with internationally renowned photographer, Paul Caponigro. Kerr has been a BRG artist member since 2009.

Pulse, Kerr’s sophomore exhibition at the BRG features her photographs that are her black and white pictorial response to the natural world. Her photographs explore a nature that speaks simultaneously of ephemera and permanence, passages and sanctuary, reflections and revelations. They are signposts, reminders and guides to the experiences possible when we are truly still. The images in Pulse are the artist’s exploration of the constant natural force present in nature. These images represent exploring the invisible thread that binds all things together.

Kathleen Lemoine has been an artist member of BRG since 1987. Despite the fact that Lemoine lives and works in Baton Rouge, she cites her birthplace, New Orleans, as a huge influence on her art, crediting the tropical, urban landscape of the city with some of her most powerful images. Additionally, the Gulf Coast serves as a source of inspiration for Lemoine, who finds herself infatuated by the subtle colors of the marsh and bayous. Lemoine's obsession with painting is one that came to her after becoming a young mother of three.  Early on, Lemoine sought out every opportunity to exhibit her work, a process that served to only further entrench her own conviction that she wanted to process her life through art. Lemoine's work has been shown across the nation, from California to New Jersey. In 1992, Lemoine's work in 15x15x15 – A Compact Competition took home the Juror's Special Recognition Award. Three years earlier, her piece, titled Backyard Sentinel, was selected by Lamar Advertising for billboard reproduction following its inclusion in Art for Art's Sake (1989).

Lemoine’s exhibit, The Release of Geometry highlights her long-standing habit of recycling scraps from paintings on paper into small collages. These works combine painterly fragments with informal geometry suggesting land, sea and sky. For this exhibition, her goal was to make large paintings possessing the same qualities of spontaneity as those inspired small works.

Jacqueline Dee Parker, an artist member of BRG since 1994, is a mixed-media painter and a poet who was born in New York City and raised in New Haven, Conn.  Parker's work cross-pollinates between the two art forms. Growing up in the home of an architect and a violinist clearly influenced her aesthetic. Both her paintings and poems rely on juxtaposition, metaphor, and the process of association, among other things, to express some sense of order, humanity and emotional intent. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts (Creative Writing/Painting & Drawing) from Louisiana State University (LSU) and a Bachelor of Art from Sarah Lawrence College.  Parker has been an instructor at LSU since 1993, teaching formerly in the Department of English and in the School of Art.  Her poems appear in many literary journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, The Southern Review, Chelsea, The Pittsburgh Quarterly and American Diaspora: Poetry of Exile, among others. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana State Division of the Arts.

Parker’s exhibition, What’s Left Unsaid, evokes the poetic expressions of her lyrical poetry into large scale collages. Additional inspiration for the pieces comes from the language of music, where rests inform phrasing and structure, likewise arousing measures of response. With restrictions of her materials and color, Parker supports her intentions in making this beautifully crafted show. Collage elements include papers from antique sheet music and literature printed in the late 1800s, the bare areas where words and music literally end.  By creating spaces from these fragments, a new emotional architecture emerges.