Slivers by the River

Painted Portals: Photos: by Leona Strassberg Steiner 

Faceted Figures: Collages: by Moira Crone

Opening night January 14th, 6-9 pm.

Artists’ talk Sunday January 15th, 1pm with moderators Kathy Rodriguez and Veronica Cross, in the gallery.

 

Two artists explore the architecture, people, and ambience of their Bywater/Marigny neighborhoods

 

Moira Crone writes:

The last few years, I have been traveling on the border between figurative painting and collage. These Faceted Figures are a new evolution, perhaps synthesis. I still draw upon sources that have been close throughout: the German and Austrian expressionists, symbolists such as Klimt, and American collagist Romare Bearden.  Recently, while  working with a model at the Art Students League in New York, I began using collage as mosaic in small paintings on paper. A magic realism emerged: a woman became a butterfly, a model in a kimono dissolved into geological illustrations. Once I came home, I created larger images in the same vein, including friends posing with spirit animals from dreams, and night scenes in my beloved New Orleans neighborhood, very improbable, but taken from life. A facet of these new pieces is the impossible, the oneiric, and the disparate, gathering itself into form, rebelling against chaos, fragments refusing to fall apart. 

 

Leona Strassberg Steiner writes:

In my photographic process I sometimes explore the unexplainable, things that appear, then disappear, visions, or dreams. “Slivers by the River/Painted Portals” was photographed at night, so the work exudes the unknown or the unseen.  I used a soft matte paper, adding color by hand and photoshop. Creating cyanotypes and lumen cyanotypes added another layer of days past. I see these photographs as portraits of houses as they sing, scream, cry, and moan. 

 

Spirits in dwellings have long impacted my life. I moved to The Bywater because the neighborhood reminded me of Neve Tzedek, a neighborhood, built in 1887, outside of the old port city of Jaffa in Palestine. I lived there in a very old house while pursuing my dance career in the 1980’s. The area was inhabited by artists of all kinds, finding common ground in the old, decaying, and neglected buildings we called home. 

 

My house in The Bywater was built in the 1840’s, so there are spirits roaming the neighborhood at night. At times I find myself turning around to see if someone is behind me, and they usually are.  Can you see them swirling about?

 

For more information, interviews, photos, please contact:

Moira Crone, moiracrone@gmail.com

Leona Strassberg Steiner, leonastr@gmail.com

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