Jennifer Odem, Rising Tables at Prospect.4 New Orleans
June 5, 2017
(working drawings for Jennifer Odem, Rising Tables, 2017, site-specific installation)
511 Gallery is pleased to announce that Jennifer Odem, whose work is represented by the gallery, has been commissioned to create a site- specific sculpture, Rising Tables for Prospect.4 New Orleans, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. The title is a reference to both the natural environment and unique cultural landscape of New Orleans.
Rising Tables, 2017 is a site-specific sculptural installation that will be built on the Crescent Park riverbank of the Mississippi River. The sculpture will consist of several tables that vary in size, material, and style, placed one above the other, beginning with the largest at the base and gradually getting smaller. The individual and distinct tables will be assembled to create an elegant and unified form. Odem has stated that the sculpture is also,
. . . a poetic marker recording the swells and shallows of the deep river. The individual tables represent the domestic and intimate personal aspects of a home. Rising and sinking, they explore the height of the atmosphere and the depths of the earth. They measure the river at other intervals of time, between life and death, between the personal and the universal, and between the fleeting and the floating.
Prospect.4 includes the work of 73 international, national, and regional artists, and Jennifer Odem’s sculpture is one of 12 site-specific works commissioned for the exhibition. As Odem’s sculpture rises from the batture, it reflects on both the displacement of lives and property caused by river flooding, but also on the above-water rising and survival of the people and objects displaced. By incorporating domestic objects into the natural landscape, Odem articulates the personal and integral relationship of New Orleans’ landscape with its residents and its culture.
Prospect.4’s Artistic Director is Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University.
More information about Prospect.4 can be found at www.prospectneworleans.com.