jetheriot, A New Collection of Urban Ruin, Photography and Concrete Poetry
October 11 - November 24, 2008

jetheriot's interest in photography began while undertaking an analysis of a vibrant yet largely undocumented folk art tradition in his home state of Louisiana: the painting of concrete statues of the Virgin Mary and their placement in Catholic burial sites. His debut exhibition in Lafayette earlier this year featured a collection of photographs representing three years of field-work in the graveyards of southern Louisiana. This body of work stands as the most comprehensive record of the tradition to date. By analyzing hundreds of statues, specifically the subtle variations in the application of facial markings, he was able to uncover a previously unidentified and startlingly rich structure to this image-based folk tradition. The fact that the practice is passed on from painter to painter without any explicit instruction in technique makes the discovery of this consistent structure all the more remarkable. “Grief in Joy's Clothing”, a 26-image sequence of painted faces drawn from his library of images, serves as a distillation of this tradition's iconography and will be presented at the upcoming exhibition at Vaknin Gallery.

Another current running through the work of jetheriot is his exploration of the dual status of the printed word as both a place-holder for symbolic associations as well as a picture-image in its own right. Ancient writing traditions such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese calligraphy occupy this fertile ground between text-as-symbol and text-as-painting. During the height of the Modernist movement in Europe, writers and painters began to develop several techniques for using the printed word imagistically and in the middle of the 20th century, these efforts blossomed into an international movement which came to be known by the term “concrete poetry”. Composed on a vintage Webster manual typewriter and enlarged to painting-sized proportions, the concrete poems of jetheriot – which incorporate both photographic and typographical elements --  will be presented at Vaknin Gallery for the first time. Photographs of – and actual pieces of – a demolished Houston sidewalk which featured spray-painted concrete poems on its surface will also be exhibited.

The mirrorbox is a novel technique developed by jetheriot for the visual glorification of small objects.  After photographing items carefully positioned within an architecture of assembled mirrors, the image is compounded through successive enlargements and the item assumes kaledioscopic proportions. An example of this technique using a plastic toy hare will also be featured.

jetheriot is a self-taught artist, neurologist and lecturer originally from Catahoula, Louisiana.