ARTISTS
William Monaghan: Environmental Studies
Octavia Gallery presents Environmental Studies, an exhibition of recent works by New Orleans artist William Monaghan. This will be the first exhibition in Octavia鈥檚 new 3000 square-foot gallery space at 700 Magazine Street in New Orleans, marking a new chapter for the eleven-year-old gallery founded by Pamela Bryan.
Instructed in the Bauhaus tradition at Yale University in the 1960s, Monaghan was trained in the studios of Buckminster Fuller and William Wainwright. After three decades in the Northeast, Monaghan returned to his native New Orleans in 2005, just days after the levees collapsed. Over time, Monaghan鈥檚 practice engaged on a material level a city confronted with ecological disaster. His recent work employs discarded objects, industrial fabrication methods, and precise painting techniques to make classic art projects of color, light, and picture plane that challenge our relationships with the histories, functions, and futures of everyday objects.
For Environmental Studies, Octavia presents 23 of Monaghan鈥檚 recent works, which range in size from 12鈥漻12鈥� to 96鈥漻96.鈥� Each piece enlists domestic objects and industrial debris: air vents, wire fencing, cans, corrugated siding, clothing, and endless other discarded items collected across the New Orleans landscape. The materials are sandblasted and affixed to panels in arrangements that resemble the complex geometries of the scrap yard. While retaining the narratives of industry, death of industry, consumption, post-Apocalypse, post-Katrina, etc., the materials are also chosen for their formal potentials: circles and curves intersect rectangles, crushed sheets of metal create corruscating paint patterns, zig-zags and straight lines start and stop in ways that create a sense of movement, turmoil, and disorientation.
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Octavia Gallery presents Environmental Studies, an exhibition of recent works by New Orleans artist William Monaghan. This will be the first exhibition in Octavia鈥檚 new 3000 square-foot gallery space at 700 Magazine Street in New Orleans, marking a new chapter for the eleven-year-old gallery founded by Pamela Bryan.
Instructed in the Bauhaus tradition at Yale University in the 1960s, Monaghan was trained in the studios of Buckminster Fuller and William Wainwright. After three decades in the Northeast, Monaghan returned to his native New Orleans in 2005, just days after the levees collapsed. Over time, Monaghan鈥檚 practice engaged on a material level a city confronted with ecological disaster. His recent work employs discarded objects, industrial fabrication methods, and precise painting techniques to make classic art projects of color, light, and picture plane that challenge our relationships with the histories, functions, and futures of everyday objects.
For Environmental Studies, Octavia presents 23 of Monaghan鈥檚 recent works, which range in size from 12鈥漻12鈥� to 96鈥漻96.鈥� Each piece enlists domestic objects and industrial debris: air vents, wire fencing, cans, corrugated siding, clothing, and endless other discarded items collected across the New Orleans landscape. The materials are sandblasted and affixed to panels in arrangements that resemble the complex geometries of the scrap yard. While retaining the narratives of industry, death of industry, consumption, post-Apocalypse, post-Katrina, etc., the materials are also chosen for their formal potentials: circles and curves intersect rectangles, crushed sheets of metal create corruscating paint patterns, zig-zags and straight lines start and stop in ways that create a sense of movement, turmoil, and disorientation.
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