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Yesterday, five years after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the city of New Orleans, an exhibition opened in the Clifford Gallery that gives visitors the sense of living in the Crescent City following the devastation.

Behind the Levees is a progression of Francis Cape’s art that began in November 2005, when the New York-based artist was hired to help the Louisiana State Museum salvage some of its contents.

Cape’s New Orleans-inspired work began with a series of photographs titled Waterline. Taken in the Gentilly neighborhood of the city, the pictures are of homes that not only share the common theme of destruction, but also have visible water stains showing how high the floodwater stood.

One of the photographs from Francis Cape’s exhibition titled Beyond the Levees.

 

Although he is not a photographer by trade, but a sculptor, Cape said, “People were showing me what happened to the city and I felt like I was being asked to tell a story.” Buying some basic film from the drugstore, he snapped shots as he walked around the Gentilly neighborhood.

During this walk, he was struck by the otherwise ordinary nature of Gentilly. “It could be here in Hamilton, it could be in the Midwest — this is a typical American middle class area,” he said. “This could be my neighborhood; it felt very close to home.”

Cape expanded on Waterline after visiting New Orleans in subsequent years.

The piece Four Folding Chairs consists of chairs that frame photos of the FEMA trailers that served as makeshift homes. Cape took the photos in 2006 following the same route he walked for Waterline.

In 2007, Cape again walked through the Gentilly neighborhood, set up a tripod in the same spots where he took the first set of photographs in 2005, and shot comparison images. The series New Orleans 2005/2007 shows how, in some cases, the houses look almost exactly the same, in others, they are rebuilt, and some houses no longer exist

This is the first time all of Cape’s New Orleans works are being shown together.

Art professor DeWitt Godfrey noted the importance of Cape’s continuation of the project. “It’s really interesting to see the evolution of an idea,” Godfrey said. “With the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts, ArtsMix, and the sponsorship of the art department, we’re not only presenting culture, but I also see part of our mission as helping produce culture, so that an artist like Francis has the opportunity to realize a project, using the university as a laboratory for creative practice.”

More

• Behind the Levees runs Aug. 29 – Oct. 10 in the .
• Francis Cape will speak at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 15 in Golden Auditorium.
• An artist book of Cape’s New Orleans 2005/2007 photographs is on sale for $3, and 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the COVE’s continuing outreach work in New Orleans.
• Related event: 4:30 p.m. Oct. 6 in Golden Auditorium will be a lecture by Dan Cameron, founder and artistic director of U.S. Biennial, Inc., which produces Prospect New Orleans, an international biennial whose first edition opened in 2008. Cape’s work was featured in the Prospect.1 New Orleans biennial.