Installation at Historic New Orleans Collection September 2020 - April 2021
“Deliriously fertile, it is simply too rich to be refused by those with the patience and strength to weather its occasional cruelty.”
New Orleans is a city of feast days and pleasure clubs. Summers can be brutal and last most of the year. Candles melt without being lit. The humidity has a personality, it opens letters with a damp, invisible force. It swells windows and doors and feels like a jacket or an unwelcomed embrace. But summer is also a magic time and takes on otherworldly qualities. One day can seem like many when the sky darkens with a sudden violent storm that leaves streets flooded like streams and temporarily breaks the fever of a sweltering day. The ordinary, a summer storm, can be extraordinary.
This installation is a love letter to New Orleans summer and the various activities generations have enjoyed. Heat has a way of changing time. It can be mind altering. There is poetry in the feel of summer days, the longest of the year. It is a time of amusements and arcades, parks and pools—public places where folks go for relief. Water is a recurring theme for contemplation, reflection, play, and sport. It was also the theme of the 1984 World’s Fair.
Take a look around and get lost in the moment. In the words of William Hjortsberg, the installation “functions like memory, in disconnected bits and pieces, where trivial moments take on the same emotional importance as powerful events.”