Artists

Taryn Möller Nicoll
Taryn Möller Nicoll was born and raised in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. After immigrating to the United States of America, she accepted a scholarship to Otis College of Art and Design where she studied painting and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with Honours. In addition, she holds five Associate of Art degrees in Art, Illustration, Graphic Design, Multimedia and Liberal Arts and is currently completing her California Teaching Credential. She and her husband Stephen live and work concurrently out of both New Orleans and Los Angeles, USA. Taryn’s body of work reflects her belief that contemporary art has the potential to resuture our fractured world with a new, inspired approach to the good and the beautiful. Her work is created in awareness of its unique visibility, and revels in its role of making manifest of the good through the new range of possible entry points of our intricately diversified, global community.

As a figurative artist, she sees the human body as the ultimate symbol for regeneration, healing and positive progression; she is inspired by the constant adaptations occurring within us on a physical and emotional level. The human body is at once familiar and foreign to all of us, and it is this fear that is so often associated with the unknown that she aims to renovate. Taryn’s works feature lyrical syntheses of figurative references that function as a visual allegory for that which she is proposing: a personally manifested reconstruction of life as we know it. Within abstracted bodily references, gestural figure drawings enlarged biological cross sections and sheer washes of colour, Taryn balances the uncontrollable, unfamiliar qualities of our human bodies with the beauty of luscious, careful rendering and harmonious reconfiguration. Her work concentrates on acknowledging human fear and answering it with visual metaphors for active regeneration and transformation.

Joli Livaudais
My artwork is an expression of my search for insight. The photographic compositions are inspired by my unconscious mind, through journaled dreams and free writing. They are my meditations on a universe and existence that is exquisitely beautiful, perfectly synchronized, and uncompromisingly merciless. I find that my carefully weighed conclusions about the human condition challenge me more than they provide any meaningful sense of safety,comfort, or promise of a happy ending. To exist is to struggle. In my artwork, this translates as an attention to process and labor-intensive practice. The accumulation of layers, fragmentation, deterioration, and replication are natural processes that are integral to the work and the meditation of creating it. Although the nature of the work lends it a timeless quality, I choose to use contemporary and experimentally combined materials including resin, photographic ink jet prints, aluminum foil and electrical circuits. The concepts I am exploring are primal, but my interpretation and understanding of them is anchored in today.

Rachel Jones Deris
I am primarily a painter. I use a thin plastic material to make thickly encrusted oil paintings that appear to exist directly on the wall. My style hovers between representation and abstraction, and most of my imagery comes from dated and mass-produced nature and science book sets, reference books, and textbooks. In my youth I devoured these materials, looking for representations of the natural world; the images contained were burned upon my memory. The pictures portrayed views and experiences which were not my own, but as I digested them, they became a part of my personal visual lexicon. I enjoyed that these images reference the Romantic concepts of Nature and the Sublime; though due to their origins they are mediated versions that reflect our shared non-experience.

I now use these clippings as starting points for paintings. In translating all of this imagery to paint, I am attempting to re-imagine minor, forgotten, mass-produced images as things that are new, singular, and permanent. The final goal is to produce a painting that generates as intense of an experience as possible; to impart a presence that defies their scale, and to fill them with a density and a pressure that can only exist in this kind of format. The results are works that oscillate between a maudlin naiveté and a serious, desperate search for something in painting that is worth renewing.

Shelley Aucoin
Shelley Elizabeth Aucoin earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Louisiana State University in 2006. She majored in Creative Writing and minored in French. In 2009, she also obtained a Juris Doctor and Graduate Diploma in Civil Law from LSU. A practicing attorney in New Orleans, Aucoin’s passion for art and color developed at a young age, influenced by her mother, Rita, who studied under Henry Hensche at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Shelley’s works consist primarily of acrylics and pastels. Many are mixed media with an emphasis on color and texture.

Ryn Wilson
Ryn Wilson is a photography and video artist currently living and working in New Orleans. She grew up in the Mid West and received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She spent time studying in Thailand, China and Germany and worked as a photographer and artist’s assistant in Tokyo and Shanghai. She has exhibited in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg, San Francisco, Austin, Milwaukee and New Orleans. Ryn is currently working towards her MFA at the University of New Orleans. Her recent work explores themes related to the history of film and how it affects our identity as a culture as well as our memories as individuals. Through a reevaluation of cinematic tropes, Ryn has created a series of fictional film stills. These “stills” allude to genres and repetitive imagery within the world of film without referring to any specific movie. Her fictional movie posters are created with the same approach.

Her latest video “Parallel Realms”, explores the experience of mentally projecting oneself into a movie while watching it. Relating to characters on screen influences one’s personality as well as confuses real memories with what has been watched. Ryn physically puts herself into this position by projecting scenes from movies and inserting herself as a character into the story. She exists as both a fanatic who wants to be a part of this fictitious world, and a critic making a comment on the absurdity of the charismatic influence film has over its viewers. In this dichotomy she plays both the voyeur and the exhibitionist. The sound is a collection of dramatic tracks taken from movies to emphasize cinema’s ability to manipulate viewers’ emotions. The soundtrack runs twice as long as the picture, illustrating the influence sound has over perception.