Cicada Screening Series: Shorts Night
Sept 11, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curators: Samantha Best and Kelsey Scult
Shorts Night, the first installment of The Front’s new Cicada Screening Series. Curated by Samantha Best and Kelsey Scult, the line up includes seven short videos by artists Zuri Obi, Camille Lenain, Dave Greber, Cristina Molina, phlegm, Wesley Chavis, and Liang Luscombe.
Sept 10--Oct 1, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Join us for the first exhibition presentation of Australian artist Liang Luscombe’s new short film, the science fiction extravaganza Malamadre (2022). At The Front, the narrative video transforms into an immersive, multi-channel installation. Taken from the Spanish word for the “bad mother” spider plant, Malamadre is the latest work in Luscombe’s ongoing surreal comedy series that follows Sol and Fran on their intergalactic odyssey away from the financial horrors of Earth and towards the planet Howl.
Jul 5--22, 2022
Carroll Gallery at Tulane University, New Orleans
Curators: Samantha Best and Elliott Stokes
A group exhibition featuring work by members of New Orleans artist collective The Front, shown alongside a Summer Reading List made up of books that helped shape their art practices. Featured artists: Lily Brooks, Anita Cooke, Nurhan Gokturk, Augustus Hoffman, Ann Haley, Blas Isasi, Dani Leal, Yashira Lopez Davalos, Sara Madandar, Ruth Owens, Cynthia Scott, Rosalie Smith, ShannonStewart, Elliott Stokes, Tom Walton, Kelsey Scult Elvira Castillo.
Nov 19, 2021, Jun 10, 2022, and Jun 21, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Presented by Tilted House
Organizing Curator: Samantha Best
Rubber Flower is a monthly reading series and open mic presented by Tilted House, a small book press in New Orleans. The series began in 2017 as a bridge between poetry circles. They welcome everyone to share their work! Poetry is their primary focus, but the open mic segment is also open to musicians and other storytellers. They also provide a space for anyone who wants to sell their books, zines, broadsides, etc., regardless of whether or not they’re reading. To celebrate the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 issues of Tilted House Review, the Front hosted lamplit evenings in the backyard and an art exhibition inside the galleries featuring work from Tilted House editors, contributors, and friends. Invited readers included fahima ife, Andy Young, Nikki Mayeux, and Rodrigo Toscano.
Nicole Levaque: Companion Planting
April 9--May 8, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Nicole Levaque (b. 1991) is a settler Canadian artist, currently based in Hamilton, Ontario. Levaque works through sculptural installations and ceramics to address hierarchies of consumption, chronic pain, and her emotional attachment to objects. She uses ceramics for its familiarity rooted in touch and the immediacy of its materiality. Each vessel is handbuilt, precarious in the interpretation of usefulness and function. Embracing failure and intuitive making is central to her work. Companion Planting is the next iteration of the works Meadowsweet for Millstones and Through a Seed line, an installation built around living with a body reliant on pharmaceuticals and matrilineal inheritance.
Jul 9--Aug 7, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Collective Unconscious is an exhibition featuring Craig Auge, Cesar Lopez, CJ Charbonneau, Samantha Haan, and Mary Clara Hutchison–the five artists who run PLUG, a curatorial collective in Kansas City, Missouri. Though their mediums and styles vary widely, the works on display at The Front share a common approach of repurposing systems and languages commonly found in our material world. For Auge, it’s salvaged industrial and print materials; Lopez, flag conventions; Haan, weave patterns; Charbonneau, abandoned garbage; and Hutchison, decaying personal objects. By either rendering the familiar unfamiliar, or finding order in apparent chaos, these works challenge and expand our collective unconscious
Jan 8--Feb 6, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Kyle McLean is an artist living and working in New Orleans, LA. Originally from Long Island, NY. Kyle has spent the last four years gaining experience in the coffee industry as a parallel to his art practice, having founded Pond Coffee in early 2020. An avid collector of clothing and homewares, the process of finding and sorting is evident in his work. The materials presented in this exhibition are mostly found. In the forms and arrangements, he would like to inspire in the viewer questions about classification, identification, agency, individuality, transformation, and organization. How can we inject new possibilities into extant structure in order to better equip individuals and familial units to live in peace and harmony with the natural world? What can we surmise from the organizational patterns of nature and how they react once polluted and threatened? How can we apply these lessons to harness human capacity for organization?
Ann Marie Auricchio: Collision with the Unconscious
Jan 8--Feb 6, 2022
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Ann Marie Auricchio is a painter that explores perceptions of experiences, and the complexities of emotional and cognitive associations we make with our world. The paintings materialize from the convergence of frenetic energy, environment, light/shadow, anxiety, meditation, history, memory, and a pure visceral response to both these physical and psychological places. These works on paper occurred in the studio as a way of “thinking out loud" while working on a new series of large paintings titled Collision with the Unconscious: A Journey of Transformation. Referencing the three levels of consciousness, the metaphorical painting series depicts a visceral interpretation of shared human experiences.
Feb 13--Mar 7, 2021
The Front, New Orleans
Curator: Samantha Best
Imbolc is a group exhibition featuring six artists who recently joined collectively-run gallery The Front and curated by fellow new member Samantha Best. Marking the close of one chapter and the beginning of another, the title Imbolc references the Gaelic festival held annually on February 1st to celebrate the start of Spring. The show includes a range of mediums: figurative paintings by Tom Walton and Sara Madandar, photography by Daniela Leal, installations by Elliott Stokes and Rooms by DLUX and performance by Rodney A. Brown.
Ryan Lauderdale: Plaza at Night
Nov 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
For Tête-à-tête’s November exhibition, New York-based artist Ryan Lauderdale presents Plaza At Night, a disorienting video exploration of globulous bulbs and metallic lamps reflected against darkened windows. The imagery evokes what Lauderdale calls “the weird magic of artificial light” that makes nightscapes seductive and misleading. Lauderdale has chosen to pair his video with a found YouTube dashcam video of a car driving at night through the brutalist architecture of Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY, a hulking monument to Modernism’s failures to deliver on its utopian promises.
Guadalupe Maravilla and Sandy Williams IV: Volver! Volver! and Time x Place
Oct 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
For Tête-à-tête’s October exhibition, Guadalupe Maravilla presents video documentation of his 2017 Bronx Museum performance of undocumented mariachi singers singing “Volver! Volver!,” a traditional latin love song that pleads for one’s lover to “Return! Return!” Here, the artist reinterprets the song as an ode to a missing loved one on the other side of the border. For this project, Maravilla has chosen to pair this performance and border landscape with artist Sandy Williams IV’s scene of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of the recent white supremacist rally protesting the city’s plan to remove a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee. Williams’ piece Unattended Baggage (2017) sits in front of the now tarp covered statue. A timer on the suitcase counts up from the last time it was picked up, so that the longer the suitcase remains in place, the more it signals that it needs to move.
Finnegan Shannon (nee Shannon Finnegan): Fashionablecanes.com (from Self-portraits series)
Sept 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
For Tête-à-tête’s September exhibition, Finnegan has paired a drawing that spells out the URL for fashionablecanes.com with excerpts of product images and descriptions lifted directly from the cane retailer’s website. The drawing is part of their Self portrait series, which also includes phrases such as "Reinventing my strangeness as an art form that only I am the perfect practitioner” and "Choreography based on my everyday movements." The “h” in “Fashionable” hangs below the rest of the word inserted with a carrot, urging both the artist and the viewer to recognize the beauty of imperfections. The bombastic claims made in the advertising texts that float across the screen cross paths with images of the described canes, and humorously fall flat on its promises to “refresh and revitalize you everyday” or “make you too hot to handle!” Their absurdity is amplified for anyone using a screen reader, as Finnegan has used the retailer’s evocative language as the alt text audio for the sight impaired. Though comically imperfect, fashionablecanes.com is a step towards a future where canes are something to show off instead of hide.
Leo Castaneda: Levels and Bosses Game Trailer
Aug 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
Leo Castaneda’s work merges the gaming industry with the fine art world, not creating art about games or games about art, but a fusion of the two. Since 2009, his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and VR works have mapped the various landscapes, characters, and actions of a forthcoming multi-level video game titled Levels and Bosses. For Tête-à-tête’s August 2017 exhibition, Castaneda imagines a speculative launch for the video game’s first level. The promotional trailer is inserted into three scenarios, each part of an imagined viral advertising campaign showing up in feasible and impossible contexts alike.
Rachael Starbuck: The only two-sided sense
July 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
Rachael Starbuck explores touch, distance, and scale, and their attendant feelings of desire, longing, and frustration. On our homepage, she presents two nested videos that stimulate longing by triggering tactile memories. In Washing, Starbuck’s hand acts as a surrogate for the user’s finger: in order to see a hand wipe over the smooth blue surface, the user must rub the surface of her phone or trackpad. And while the user can see Starbuck’s hand wiping down the surface, and performs a similar rubbing action herself, the slick wetness of the artist’s hand is lost on dry fingers across screens or trackpads. Similarly, as the user’s finger moves over The surf’s disguise of beginnings the camera acts as a proxy for the hand, but the desire to touch the soft fur is left unsatiated by petting glass or plastic. When negotiating between the virtual and real, the feeling of distance is felt even at close proximity.
Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish: Currency WSHTF
June 2016--ongoing
Tête-à-tête, www.tete-ahh-tete.net
Curator: Samantha Best
For Tête-à-tête’s debut exhibition, Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish turn their attention to doomsday preppers, a cultural group that copes with fears of annihilation through personal accumulation---purchasing hundreds of cans of soup, stockpiling guns, etc. By layering a hypothetical landscape of the artists’ design onto the Google Map street view of Bodie State Historic Park in California, Abrams and Stanish imagine a world WSHTF (When Shit Hits the Fan), an extremist term preppers use to express the inevitable onset of apocalyptic conditions brought on by climate change.
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
September 27 2017 – January 21 2018,
New Museum, New York
Curators: Johanna Burton, Sara O'Keeffe, and Natalie Bell
Curatorial Intern: Samantha Best
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity.
Haim Steinbach: Reading/Looking Events
Nov 30, Dec 1, and Dec 2, 2012
The Artist's Institute, New York
Curators: Samantha Best, John Henry Donner, Ryan Lauderdale, Sara Shaoul
As part of the fifth season of The Artist's Institute dedicated to Haim Steinbach, Curatorial Fellows asked people to read texts by Arjun Appadurai (The Thing Itself, 2006), Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker (Notes on Metamoderism, 2010), and Artie Vierkant (The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010) and held three meditations.
Another Place: The C12 Exhibition
September 18--October 18, 2014
205 Hudson Gallery, Hunter College Galleries, New York
Curators: Samantha Best, Lindsay Aveilhe, and Sophia Alexandrov
Another Place: The C12 Exhibition presents the work of eight Hunter College MFA graduates from the past decade whose art practices redefine space: Jules de Balincourt, Emmy Catedral, Ryan Lauderdale, Rodrigo Lobos Huber, Cybele Lyle, Ryan McNamara, Carolyn Salas, and Denise Schatz. Through painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, these artists create alternative places that function within, but as a counterpoint to, society. Philosopher Michel Foucault calls such locales heterotopias—circumscribed areas that deviate from customary rules and behaviors.
Portraits: More Than Just A Pretty Face
June 20--Aug 20, 2008
Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond
Curators: Samantha Best, Amanda Bryan, Claire Dixon, Libby Girard, Amy Lenhardt and Megan Rupnik
Portraits: More Than Just a Pretty Face examines how portraits—be they artworks or everyday objects—use specific visual codes to assert individual identities, cultural norms, social roles and relationships between the person portrayed and viewers. It includes artworks in a range of media and dating from various time periods, including contemporary works by internationally renowned artists Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close, celebrated regional artists Thomas A. Daniel and Theresa Pollak, and emerging artists Sandra Cornejo and Chino Amobi. The salient questions that are posed in the exhibition— "How does the portrait employ or manipulate visual codes; to what end? What statement does it make about the person portrayed and whose interests does it serve?"—are drawn from ongoing research by Dr. Eric Garberson, Associate Professor in the VCUarts Department of Art History, which examines the history of ideas surrounding the production and reception of portraits.