A Collaboration at Many Levels

Lynda Frese and Barbara Allen: Artist and Writer

Reconstituting the Vanished: Gender, Memory and Placemaking in the Delta South


Lynda Frese and Barbara Allen met each other in the 90's when both were professors at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. Allen has since moved on to her position with Virginia Tech as Professor and Co-Director Graduate Program Science and Technology. Frese is a Distinguished Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Louisiana Lafayette.

During their 3 day visit in Blacksburg last month I learned that  both held fascinations with a sense of place and the people who once inhabited those places. Where Lynda created images, Barbara wrote about them.  Hence this exhibit. The combination of a visual and textual narrative allows this display to be accessible to many people at multiple levels.

But really, this exhibit is more than just two talents collaborating, it is about exploring how we  recollect memory and how history is created in unexpected ways.  It is also about how history is actually created in a non-linear fashion.

The exhibit explores the lives of  four women: Marie Thereze Coin-Coin (b. 1742, born as a slave in northern Louisiana but became known as a planter and businesswoman); Micaela Pontalba (b. 1795,  a New Orleans aristocrat, business woman and real estate developer); Marie Laveau (b. 1794, a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo in New Orleans); and Caroline Dormon (b.1888, a conservationist, artist and writer from Louisiana).

The exhibit helps us to explore how the work of these women is interwoven into their daily lives. 

 
Maria Jones, Jeff Joiner, Diana Bayless

Further collaboration occurred when students from Professor Jeff Joiner's FourDesign program   (School of Visual Arts Virginia Tech) worked closely with Barbara Allen to create an elegant installation design bringing the written word into an art form. Mariah Jones and Diana Bayless created the installation for Lynda and Barbara's work, making sure there were multiple intuitive ways for viewers to connect with the exhibit. 


When you come in to view the work, translucent paper holds the text as it floats just in front of the walls and adjacent to Frese's digital collage images. Allen's text moves back and forth between and next to the artwork allowing the viewer to dip contemplatively between the words and the pictures as needed.  


Because some of the text is suspended on fine wire, it has an ethereal quality making it seem more like a memory, especially when viewed within the context of the story and all of its parts. 


I am emphasizing the non-linear viewing of this because history is not always considered to be circuitous. Except that it is.  Most of life doesn't happen in a straight, logical format. There are twists and turns,  dashed expectations, and unexpected exultations. Sometimes life, a.k.a. history, does happens linearly, but more often than not we are caught in multiple tasks simultaneously trying to complete, take care of, or render our way through the maze of life which becomes our history.  

The exhibit runs through May 16th.