Luis Cruz Azaceta

Luis Cruz Azaceta. Man in the roof, 2005. From the installation “Swept Away” (Prospect. 1 New Orleans) 8” x 6” x 3.5". Courtesy of the artist

November 1, 2008 - January 18, 2009

 By Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

As the nation’s largest art biennial plays out in New Orleans, we are again reminded of the complex and controversial nature of such a setting - one inseparable from the inconceivable events and aftermath of tragedy on such an epic scale. As the struggle to rebuild continues in New Orleans, many of the artists in Prospect 1 strive to put form to feeling within the troubling context of such a city. Artists like Luis Cruz Azaceta rise to the occasion, providing an insightful and engaging commentary through richly-layered pieces. In the installation, “Swept Away,” Azaceta offers an arresting personal panorama through sculpture, painting and photography.

Upon first entering the exhibition, one is immediately struck by an expansive floor installation that spreads out in a graveyard-like fashion with thirty-six squares of plywood panels covering the ground in a square formation. Small makeshift sculptures sit upon each panel like tombstones - offering a reliquary for the former owners and places once housing these objects. Each shrine contains a different combination of elements: photographs, milk cartons, water bottles, a paint can, a football and other ready-mades often bound together by duct-tape. In this way, Azaceta draws order out of chaos and rescue from refuse. Here is the effective artist at work - collecting, studying, and drawing from the experiences around him - fashioning a newly-ordered dialogue in an environment of disarray and disposability.

The artist continues this procession of assemblages along a narrow, white shelf running low against a wall. A series of various containers washed in milky-white paint are lined up side by side like a carefully-structured sentence. Another assortment of objects placed within and atop the bottled forms completes the coded quality of the composition, thus creating a new language through repetitious, yet carefully modeled, variations on this theme of social entropy.

Within the line-up of the mass-produced sit highly personal markers of individual experience. A photograph depicting a dead body covered by an American flag rests within the open lid of a small wooden chest. Other imagery of abandoned houses and distressed people during Katrina are juxtaposed with generic forms of mass consumption, fueling this sense of a dangerous commutative existence, wherein life and humanity struggle to retain their sanctity.

The use of the container reappears throughout Azaceta’s work through homes, bottles, pots, and pipes. In one particularly potent piece, a photograph of a man breaking through an attic roof to escape swelling floodwaters is repeated twice, once upside down, on a bisected log. The home, once a container of life, quickly becomes a vessel of destruction. Other containers of the human form, such as wheelchairs, become striking metaphors in two haunting sculptures- on one rests a large duct-taped cocoon form, while on another wheelchair that faces a window, the suggested form of the body crumbles into crumpled white-washed bottles strung together by loose strings; both figurative forms seemingly waiting for a hopeless rescue or a retribution that no longer matters.

Throughout the exhibition, Azaceta weaves in tragic social and psychological experiences in a powerfully subtle way. Like archeological artifacts unearthed in the aftermath of disaster, Swept Away provides a poignant cross-section of our experiences, whether they be first-hand or those of a bystander. As many artists genuinely attempt to connect to the deeply complicated and interwoven cultural situation here in the city - none complete this as honestly and completely as artists, like Azaceta, who were part of New Orleans during the great deluge that forever changed our individual lives, our city and our future.