Revenants: A New Orleans Reliquary
Post-Katrina Photographs by Julie Dermansky
with Poems by Ann McGarrell
The Clifford B. West Gallery: May 30 – June 28, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, May 30, 5 – 7pm
Poetry Reading by Laura Boyajian and Ann McGarrell: Wednesday, June 11, 7pm
Revenants: A New Orleans Reliquary, Post-Katrina Photographs by Julie Dermansky with Poems by Ann McGarrell, will be on view in AVA Gallery and Art Center’s Clifford B. West Gallery, from May 30 through June 28, 2008. A reception, free and open to the public, will take place Friday, May 30, from 5 to 7pm. A poetry reading by Ann McGarrell and Laura Boyajian will take place on Wednesday, June 11, at 7pm.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been left in a state of devastation and decay. One year after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dermansky began a series she continues to revisit today. The work was shot between November 2006 and March 2008. Dermansky undertook the monumental task of documenting Katrina’s tragic aftermath. The photographic images she captured and the objects she collected, with the scrupulousness and passion of an archaeologist, provide a strikingly intimate record of the storm’s destruction.
Writer Ann McGarrell, a longtime observer of New Orleans’s pleasures and menaces, was inspired by Julie Dermansky’s work and set about crafting the poems that will accompany the displayed photographs and objects.
In Revenants: A New Orleans Reliquary, Post-Katrina Photographs by Julie Dermansky with Poems by Ann McGarrell, the collaboration between a visual artist and a writer offers us the opportunity to reflect on the tragedy of New Orleans on a personal and emotional level.
Julie Dermansky was born in New York City in 1966. She earned her BFA from Sophie Newcomb (part of Tulane University). She is currently developing a project drawing from Tulane’s Natural History Collections that will combine her Post-Katrina series with her work in natural history and anthropology. The Chicago Field Museum is incorporating aspects of her project in their show, “Nature Unleashed,” which opens in May 2008 and which will travel to eight other natural history museums. She has recently returned from photographing the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, as part of an ongoing series on Dark Tourism (sites of tragedy).
Ann McGarrell is a writer and translator whose poems and essays have appeared in American and British magazines since the 1960s. Her poetic collaboration with the painter Jack Beal, Flora, was published in 1990. In 2007, she published her anecdotal history of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program. In 2003, she was the recipient of a Bogliasco Fellowship in Literature, and her translation of Vittoria Ronchey’s The Face of Isis received the 1997 PEN/Renato Poggioli award for best translation from the Italian. She lives in Newbury, Vermont, with her husband, the painter James McGarrell, whose lifelong devotion to New Orleans and its music is, along with Julie Dermansky’s powerful photographs, one of the sources of her Revenants poems.