Like any survey, “Hot Up Here,” organized by the CAC’s Visual Arts Director Dan Cameron, is a mixed bag not expected to have an overarching narrative the way themed shows do. This cross-section, the first of a series, displays that artists working in New Orleans and Louisiana are focusing on a variety of subjects. There is the coded and rich history of the area, warts and all. It’s something that in New Orleans is never far out of mind or covered up. Others are looking at the Post-Katrina situation, more than four years on, with a more reserved conceptual approach than the immediate traumatic morning such a huge catastrophe initially elicits. It is also refreshing to see still others addressing subjects in a broader way.

Stephen Collier’s photo Untitled (Green and Pink Army) blankly stares out at you as you enter the exhibition signaling there is more than a pat collection of art from New Orleans waiting in the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center. The image is foreboding in that it is hard to tell if there is anything in the Army duds, or if it just an empty suit. That, and the dull gray green and bright pink also draws you in.

Entering the space is another of Collier’s, a 10 sec video that because it loops so seamlessly is endless, rather than terse, infinitely killing time. Five Finger Fillet depicts a hand, fingers spread, as a knife stabs the table between them in that dangerous game of accuracy, nerve and balls. Collier’s photos of figures in hoodies, suits and camouflage jumpers look like their features have been scribbled out. With a closer look comes the realization the neon marks that appear to be drawing on a digital picture in Photoshop are actually physical material: silly string. This play between a photographed subject, a manipulated print and the re-photograph is further at work in a series of images that combine aggressive figures confronting the viewer with sugar sweetness. Dog the Bounty Hunter and slightly trashy women from the 80s offer you ice cream, cake and a surprise party. Also on offer are an armful of puppies, their eyes cut out. Barely noticeable on the floor in front of the framed prints are neatly lined up shotgun cartridges. The message is unclear beyond a devious playfulness, but the results are captivating.

Reminiscent of Robert Williams are Scott Guion’s satires of cultural imagery with a penchant for 50’s decor. In Stack-O-Lee, 2008, that symbol of 1990’s Louisiana pop art, George Rodrigue’s “Blue Dog” is depicted with fiendish wolf-like features, and painted with a facility the character’s creator doesn’t quite possess. A snowman named Mr. Bingle–a classic Christmas icon from New Orleans department store Maison Blanche–follows the dog with a gun, fantasizing about stealing Blue Dog’s candy can, which the dog holds in it’s mouth like a fat cigar, and it’s ice cream cone worn like a hat. Above, a stereotypical devil, like in the work of Coop, floats, shooting dice from his eyes.

The thing most interesting about Guion, and artists like him, is the juxtaposition of realistically painted elements with cartoony ones. It is also odd how such imagery is made with such traditional means as oil paint, complete with layers and glazes. In a French Quarter setting, painted in a simple realist manner, a grotesque cartoony couple (that look like the aunt and uncle of the Garbage Pail Kids) have a domestic dispute. The woman brandishes a knife, the man wields a broken Dixie Beer bottle. Behind them a lawn jockey, that racist tschotcke, rears up on a red horse in a quotation of the famous portrait of Napoleon, by Jacques-Louis David. One of New Orleans’ many famous sons, Louis Armstrong, appears as a vision of Renaissance saintliness.

Michelle Levine contributes a frieze of paintings, all from 2009, that depict trashed McDonald’s signs around New Orleans and neighboring Metairie. Some are straightforward depictions; others are more abstracted through cropping and composition. These more interesting ones contain the literalized irony of so many destitute fast-food heavens along with an alienating otherness in the way a careful relationship between figure and ground can create.

Chris Sullivan accompanies Levine with another frieze, a series of small digital pictures created between 2005 and 2007 collectively titled Underperforming Billboard Dreams in New Orleans. In his statement, Sullivan explains that one thing he didn’t mind getting washed away by the floodwaters of Katrina were all the billboards. “Closer to ground, language sprouted—with a spray can, a shard of moldy plywood, a cell phone number and some useful verb (gutting) to perform, a person was in business.” The images depict such signs; the texts are funny, clever, unintentionally ironic, and sometimes desperate. “Billionaire Barber’s Club L-L-C.” “Dang Ideal Supermarket.” “Free Hot Meals Every Wednesday 12 – 2P Around Back.” There is something off about the locations, though. How did such a ratty sign manage to stay up downtown, now that all the other waste has been cleared away? It slowly becomes apparent that these signs have been moved from the out of the way places they’d originated to more prominent locales via digital manipulation. The process is most effective when they hover in between, completely plausible as a rundown billboard painted over, or added on a computer. The texts have the charm anything made out of utility and amateurism does, unintentional poeticism and graphic finesse abounds. “Free Medical Care” is written in sharp condensed lines like a metal band’s name, or the way abstracted words appear in a Thomas Scheibitz painting. “Barch Tire Floated to 701 Witte Taparas Metarie”[sic] has a lighthearted gallows humor but is almost illegible in the sign painter’s attempt to make groovy 60s lettering.

David Sullivan’s looping HD animations, Sunset Refinery, 2008, and Swamp Gas, 2009, are pretty in a garish way, they face each other in a darkened gallery, hissing, whirring and churning away a perfect mixture of beauty and decay. The color schemes combining black blobs with blues and wispy neon greens and yellows vibrate and glow. The two animations trade on the notion of how the sensation of something ominous and gloomy can be a deeply satisfying aesthetic experience.

As a whole, “Hot Up Here” provides a look not only at what cultural producers in the region are up to in terms of the burning question, “what’s it like there now?” But also engaging in personal practices that have a conversation with a broader world of art.

--Erik Wenzel

(Images: Stephen Collier, Untitled (Black Hoodie), 2006, courtesy the artists and CAC; Scott Guion, The Lawn Jockey's Revenge, Oil on canvas, courtesy of the artists and CAC; Michelle Levine, from Signs of the Times, 2009, Oil on canvas, courtesy of the artists and CAC; Chris Sullivan, Underperforming Billboard Deams (MoBeauty), 2009, billboard, courtesy of the artist and Slight Publications; David Sullivan, Sunset Refinery 2008, Still from looping HD animation, courteys of the artist and CAC)