DESTINATION (UN)KNOWN:

THE VALUE OF FORGETTING IN ORDER TO RE-COLLECT

Within the ebb and flow of my visual work there are themes to which I continually return. In a twenty-plus year arc of professional activity ideas and media vary, but beneath the surface lurk patterns and relationships. Thematically speaking, the visual culture traditions that I have investigated include pin-ups, post-industrial landscapes (and decaying cars),
memorial “portraits”, signifiers/symbols of persona and gender, and the stuff and symbols of petitioner’s dreamscapes. My choice of media has included painting, drawing, film/video, installation, fabric and thread, sound, photography, and printmaking. I permit ideas to drive the form. These ideas reflect personal and familial experience couched in larger socio-
political narratives.

This exhibition will include my films and videos, paintings, and photographs from my book project on altar traditions. Two pieces in particular anchor this show – one in progress and an earlier foundational piece. PASSENGER (2016), my first film, merges my exploration into popular/historical representations of women and the American “affected” landscape. That project permitted me to extend and reimagine the idea of a politicized body into an object, a place, and land. My personal trauma was memorialized via the burial of a disembodied 1965 Ford Mustang car door in a junkyard, a riff on the pop culture relationship of cars to “girls”. Similarly, in my newest film “WHERE ARE YOU?”, a compromised landscape is surrogate for memory and transformation. As “the natural” is subsumed, submerged, a pieced-together reality is constructed, offering unlikely catharsis.

About the artist:

Veronica Cross is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, video, photography, and installation. A returning New Orleans resident, Ms. Cross has spent over twenty years working in the realms of Visual and Performing Arts in creator/performer roles, and also as director, curator, arts writer, and special events organizer. Her exhibitions and projects have been based in Louisiana, New York City, New England, and the U.K; currently, she is developing a book on New Orleans altar traditions. Ms. Cross attended the School of Visual Arts and SUNY Empire State College in New York City; she received her BA in Art & Entrepreneurial Studies with a minor in Art History from the University of Southern Maine and her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts.