Current Exhibition

Marianne Desmarais and Jack Niven: Passages

Exhibition Dates: January 11 - February 2, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 11, 6-9 pm 

Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5 pm, except for Second Saturdays when hours are 6-9 pm.

Sound Performance by Bradley Black: 3pm Saturday, January 18th

In Passages, Marianne Desmarais and Jack Niven explore the space between places and on the edge of things, with and beyond the visible.  They imagine how it feels to touch the solid line of a handrail in the inky darkness, where it becomes a thin tether between points.  Through sculptures that employ solid/void relationships, each renders the fluid and the contained. 

Marianne Desmarais is a process-based artist whose sculptural work has evolved through a lifelong practice engaging objects' functional and aesthetic resonance.  Using art and design methods, Desmarais moves the familiar in and out of focus, mixing memories of common things with the slipperiness of new surfaces.  Her work was exhibited in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the CAC, New Orleans.  Desmarais has enjoyed residencies at ChaNorth, the Joan Mitchell Center, and the Banff Centre.  Her work is held in public and private American collections, the permanent collection of SCAD, Shanghai, and has traveled internationally.

Jack Niven is a New Orleans-based artist who produces installations using painting, sculpture, and digital media. His work employs a pop-conceptual approach to scrutinizing the imagery of found, cultural production, and industrial iconography.  His most recent small constructions combine abstracted organizations of built and painted worlds.  His work is represented in public and private collections across North America and Europe. Locally his epic “Universal Mule” painting originally produced for the first Prospect One Biennial can be found at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Connections: Staple Goods 10th Anniversary Exhibition Catalog

Exhibition catalog commemorates the collective’s 10th anniversary exhibition, Connections (May 2021), and is available for $5.

Text by Amy Mackie. Book Design by Tiffany Lin. Printed at Paper Machine. Curated by Laura Richens.

Participating Artists: Minka/Thomasine, Aaron Collier, Robyn Denny, William DePauw, Abe Geasland, Daniel Kelly IV, Kristina Knipe, J Knoblach, Norah Lovell, Kaori Maeyama, Anne Nelson, Jack Niven, Laura Richens, Cynthia Scott, Sadie Sheldon, Lorna Williams