Grisham Gallery
Courtney Egan, Extinct in the Wild, 2020, 4k digital video, silent dimensions variable
Gallery Walk and Reception
Sunday, April 16 | 2 – 4 p.m.
Included with admission and free for members
New Orleans video artist Courtney Egan is strongly inspired by the profusion of native and non-native flora around New Orleans, where she has lived and worked since 1991. Her work digitally manipulates the natural world, questioning how our perception of nature is augmented by technology. Egan creates projection-based sculptural installations that meld nature with technology, delivering an experience that is both pleasing and disconcerting. The ethereal projections – converging on walls, floors and sculptural elements – are inspired by the growing frequency of human exposure to nature via computers or television. Egan creates stunning yet “subtly impossible, hybrid tableaus” which envelop the viewer in a conversation between their memory of the natural world and a new experience with a plant or flower. She explains the fundamental irony of the experience, stating, “We get closer and farther away from the natural world simultaneously when we experience it through a technological lens.”
Courtney Egan, Soft Spots, 2008, single channel digital video projection, size variable
Through her photography practice, Egan studies plant movement and plant time. She notices what plants grow where and searches out why in order to recondition her senses towards an ecological time scale. This exploration reveals complex plant histories, plant economics and lore. Her studies have prompted the artist to place the ecology of her surroundings in the foreground, instead of thinking of plants as a backdrop for the human stage.
Courtney Egan holds an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently a Media Arts faculty member at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). She has had solo shows at Arthur Roger Gallery and Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Bradbury Museum of Art, Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Colorado State University Art Museum, and the University of Louisiana’s Hilliard Museum. Her honors include artist-in-residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute and at Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans.
Organized by HMA.
Sponsors
Lead Sponsor
Sasha and Charlie Sealy