JACOB TODD BROUSSARD: Feu Follet
May 3 – June 1, 2019
opening reception: May 3, 5:30 – 8 pm
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Feu Follet, an exhibition of new paintings by Jacob Todd Broussard. The exhibition will run from May 3 – June 1, 2019 with an opening reception Friday, May 3, from 5:30 – 8 PM.
In southern folklore, le feu follet refers to a ghostly, phosphorescent light formed over swamps, marshes, and bogs often seen by travelers at night. Bioluminescence is thought to cause this natural phenomena, which is known to lead a wanderer astray. Within this body of work, Broussard utilizes Le feu follet as a device to destabilize space and site, both optically and spectrally.
Broussard investigates this vernacular folklore, along with tropes of historical, genre, and landscape painting. He splices together different moments of otherworldly encounters and combines them into a unified supernatural environment that is both abundant and strange. The hermit saint is one occupant of this environment, a figure historically shown in a state of penance and prayer while secluded in wilderness. In these works, the romanticism of an isolated figure in the wild is sublimated. The blissful Arcadian pastoral is rendered ominously, and the figure is integrated into the landscape as a physical and geographical extension of the environment – a performative body susceptible to the elements. Broussard allows the figures to penetrate the viewers’ space with sculpted hands holding the frame, and by doing so he melds our world with the otherworldly. The amalgamation of these tropes queers and reconfigures genre, sacrifices realism, and combines separate ends of the supernatural, in attempt to gain a new truth. For Broussard, the registers of folklore become a radical act of renegotiating the nature of perception. As Broussard has stated:
Growing up in South Louisiana has given me a peculiar proximity to my lineage of Cajun French descent. There is a constant interstitial dance between myth and reality, an experimentation with romanticism, all fleshed-out against a backdrop of a dangerously alluring landscape on its last leg. To identify as a southerner often means that one’s history is inescapable and inconceivably present. How does one take on the history of a place where one is from, when the very tangible weight of that history occurred prior to one’s existence? The scenes depicted simultaneously belong of a place and of no place, belonging to themselves entirely.
JACOB TODD BROUSSARD Jacob Todd Broussard (b. 1992, South Louisiana), currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. He will receive his MFA from Yale School of Art this year. He has presented solo exhibitions with Basin Arts (Lafayette, LA), Kelli Kaufman Gallery (Lafayette, LA), and River Oaks Square Arts Center (Alexandria, LA). He has been featured in group exhibitions with Treasure Town Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Louisiana State Capital Park Museum (Baton Rouge, LA) and Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). This is Jacob Todd Broussard’s first solo exhibition with Steven Zevitas Gallery
SELECTED WORKS:
