http://www.nolafront.org/index.html
Second Saturdays at St. Claude (November 14)
http://www.scadnola.com/
| Artist Jenny LeBlanc's tamale making performance |
The "Hot Tamales" exhibition at The Front is surprisingly unique to LeBlanc's portfolio in that this exhibition did not involve printing and is not a "printstallation." However, much like her other installations, the experience of the exhibition feels similar to her other work (like that of an installation). And, in a similar fashion, "Hot Tamales" is a presentation of an assemblage of a variety of different mediums and works.
While the first room looks like a traditional white-wall gallery, the viewer notices a roped-off adjacent room and perhaps what is the most distracting detail: the aroma of hot tamales cooking. There are a few paintings and sculptures, a few drawing and photographs. The paintings are not explorations of the form of a tamale, what it looks like to eat one, or even pictorial at all. LeBlanc's paintings are impasto uses of paint employing specific color palette: variations of clay red, turmeric yellow, and other ochres.The lack of formal representation combined with the textural elements makes the the paint heavily reference ingredients.
Sculptures of pyramidal-shaped stacks of tamales of all the same material exclusively explore the tamale's form, the shape of a tamale being very distinctive. The sculptures are similar in texture and though some are glazed, the overall earthy palette deliberately restrains from addressing color. Each mediums seems to engage a different sensory experience associated with hot tamales creating the most basic visual break down of a deconstructed tamale.
Peering into the roped-off room, viewers can see a table, patterns cut out to make the appearance of wall paper and other items that seem to have recreated a casual dining room and a kitchen in the furthest room. Two women sitting at a table are going through the process of actually constructing the hot tamale. Though it was difficult to see, in Room 4 of the gallery, there is an oven where five or six people are cooking the tamales (the artist herself being among the cooks).
It is interesting that an accomplished printmaker chose to focus on the tamale itself rather than other visual qualities like its signage, for example, that goes along with the sale and production of hot tamales. It is important to ask how our daily living is visually affected by the economics of hot tamales and what larger trends that is possibly indicative of (the growth and overall greater acceptance of Hispanic culture). Taco and tamale trucks are now commonplace and becoming a genre onto themselves. Furthermore, signs for them are a huge part of their selling process, if not something that the sale is dependent upon. Even the curious combinations of Spanish and English could have been hugely engaging. Her insight that the tamale industry, like many foreign restaurants in the US, is family-centered is pretty brilliant and chock full of potential material.
Though the video by the Times Picayune was helpful and authentic, the performance aspect of the exhibition felt rather secondary. Because rooms 3 and 4 of the gallery are off-limits, there is not a lot of room in the exhibition to observe and learn about the process of hot tamale-making nor is there any other information about the process. The complete absence of text makes it clear that an educational experience was not the goal here. Viewers do not walk away from the exhibition with a greater understanding of how to make tamales or the history of hot-tamale making or the specific characteristic of the "New Orleans style" hot tamale that LeBlanc references on the website. Viewers do however have the unique opportunity to walk away from an exhibition having bought the hot tamales that were for sale during the opening, which is an unconventional riff on the traditional economics hot tamales.
The new works explored the aesthetics of the tamale that anyone would experience while eating a tamale: the aroma, the texture, the colors. At the wine bar that night, there were complimentary 'tamale shooters' in miniature sample cups being given out. That is the best metaphor I have found for this exhibition: delicious, but just a taste.
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