Exhibit at Spruill to reflect on Katrina

The National Guardsman poses on partially flooded St. Claude Avenue on the edge of New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood in the upper Ninth Ward. His rifle is at the ready as he guards the city post-Katrina. In the background sits the business called Party World. His pose is reflected in the shallow water.

“It’s a message that’s full of the irony that we lived with,” says photographer and documentary filmmaker Neil Alexander, who spent several days during the storm chronicling Katrina’s madness.

Atlantans will see how Alexander and others responded in “Katrina: Five Years of Reflection,” a retrospective that opens Aug. 13 at Spruill Gallery. Alexander will be joined by New Orleans artists Jan Gilbert, Lori K. Gordon, Debra Howell, Krista Jurisich and Brian Nolan. Along with Atlanta artist Elyse Defoor, who has deep emotional ties to New Orleans, they will show some of their previous Katrina-related work.

So “Reflections” carries multiple meanings in this exhibit. Gilbert and Howell, for example, will re-create a smaller version of their light-work installation “WaterWords” that originally appeared in New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center. It treats Katrina images like a game of Pictionary.

“It’s like when you get a Chinese fortune cookie, but instead of adding ‘ ... in bed’ at the end of a statement, here we use water words that end with the phrase ‘ ... in your home,’ ” Gilbert explained.

“It’s a little levity, but it’s quite serious at the same time,” said Gilbert. “I believe that works like ‘WaterWords’ injects a loving humor. It just helped us get through it all.”

Photographer Brian Nolan’s art literally lived through the storm. His photographs lay submerged in 10 feet of floodwater in Nolan’s Lakeview home for days. The results are what Nolan calls “residual images,” warped yet compelling.

“Over time, I began to find beauty in the swirls of emulsion,” said Nolan, who has relocated to South Carolina. “The entire image has been reduced to a wash of simple forms. These I find to be very painterly.”

For Atlanta’s Defoor, “Reflection” is a chance to reconnect with a city that had practically become her second home. She loved New Orleans and even privately married her husband there before their more official wedding in Atlanta. She loved the music, the culture of the city, and was so devastated by Katrina that she returned there months later for the traditional St. Joseph’s Day holiday -- with its altars of prepared food and other gifts.

The result was “X.U.ME,” a response to the “X” symbol that rescue workers used to mark searched houses, adding in various symbols to explain a given home’s situation.

“I was taken by the whole idea of ‘X’ being a symbol, and the connotation it brings -- how it means kisses, the ‘XOXO,’ or signing your name, by the X, or the upside down of the St. Andrew’s cross,” Defoor said. “This series is my response to that kind of stigmata that I think that symbol represented, but which found out later was a code for survival.”

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