NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Three new exhibitions of work by living artists—Rachel Jones and David Webber (two-person), Martin von Haselberg and Marcus Coates—will open in June at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The first of these exhibitions, Mnemonic Devices: Rachel Jones and David Webber, featuring recent work by the Louisiana-based artists, will opened June 6 and continue through August 23 in the second-floor Weisman Gallery for Louisiana Contemporary Art. FLOATULENTS: Inflatable Photographs by Martin von Haselberg, the first American solo museum exhibition for the Los Angeles-based artist, and Marcus Coates: Animal Instincts, comprised of five videos from the past 10 years by the British artist, open June 10, also on the second floor.

Mnemonic Devices: Rachel Jones and David Webber
A duo of Louisiana artists, Rachel Jones and David Webber explore the process of selecting and assembling information from memories and pre-existing documents into new visual amalgams. Working in painting and video respectively, the artists share an interest in dissolving imagery and narratives into expressive fragments. In her paintings, Jones depicts loosely-defined human figures and landscapes which hover on the edge of recognition. Webber, working in video, superimposes images on top of each other, evoking the cognitive process of recollection as it is built through associations. Organized by Miranda Lash, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

FLOATULENTS: Inflatable Photographs by Martin von Haselberg
Martin von Haselberg (a.k.a. Harry Kipper) was a member of the infamous London and Los Angeles-based 1970s performance art duo, The Kipper Kids. Also in the early ’70s he began evolving his deeply psychological public performance work into personal photographic self-portraiture, a practice which he continues today. His artistic lineage leads the viewer from the slapstick clowning of Spike Jones to the heightened abreaction of the 1960s Vienna Aktionists. In this, von Haselberg’s first American museum show, his latest photographic experiments are presented as inflatable works, which instead of rising into the air, rest upon the floor as sculptures. “FLOATULENTS” are air balloons in the sense of Warhol’s 1964 “Silver Flotations,” but they are more than mere design. Von Haselberg describes these new works as “time-based,” as springing from the facial contortions and grimaces of his performances. FLOATULENTS is the third in the _museological exhibition series, organized by Diego Cortez, Freeman Family Curator of Photography.

Marcus Coates: Animal Instincts
Presented in NOMA’s new permanent video art space, Marcus Coates: Animal Instincts is comprised of five video pieces featuring a range of work from the past 10 years. Ornithologist, naturalist, artist, and shaman, Coates creates videos that examine humankind’s complicated relationship to other living species. Assuming the role of a shaman in his later pieces, Coates journeys to the “lower world” of animal spirits, updating the historical role of a shaman as a community problem-solver. In his own words, “you can’t escape your humanness, but the point of my work has been to explore the degrees to which you can test that boundary and entertain the possibility of becoming something else.” Organized by Miranda Lash, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.