Press Release

NEW ORLEANS - Heriard-Cimino Gallery presents “Field Recordings,” new video pieces by Courtney Egan. The exhibition will be on view from June 5 to July 5, 2010. An opening reception to meet the artist will be held Saturday, June 5th from 6 to 8 p.m. The public is invited. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 5, or by appointment.

Courtney Egan takes images from nature and animates them in the computer in ways that are not based upon nature but are based upon human desire. In discussing her work, the artist states, “I am interested in the experience of beauty and nature, botanicals and still-lives, as they are expressed through technology. I am looking for a new kind of sublime experience that results from the intersection or convergence of nature with technology, but isn’t directly about manipulating genes. It’s more about the ways in which humans experience nature more and more, through the mediation of the computer or television, and how that experience can be enjoyable, illuminating, and disturbing simultaneously. This is a kind of hybrid experience, the experience of nature through technology that touches on the sublime.”

Courtney Egan is a noted video artist in New Orleans. She won the Isabella Liddell Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2004. In 2007, she participated in the National Museum of Women in the Arts Film Festival in Washington D.C. Her work has been shown at the New York Underground Film Festival, Auckland International Film Festival, Nemo Festival in Paris, an installation at the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm Und Videofest, Kassel, Germany, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 25 Hrs International Video Art Show in Barcelona, Spain, the Detroit International Video Festival, and the Louisiana Open at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans with Jurors, Eleanor Heartney, Louis Grachos and James Kerry Marshall. Courtney holds a BA degree from Millsaps College and an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. She lives and works in New Orleans, LA.