Hurricane Katrina (2005) is among the most significant catastrophes in United States history, not least because it triggered a painful awakening about inequality and climate injustice. The New Orleans-based artist Dawn DeDeaux has been grappling with its consequences in the decades since in work that recognises the catalytic horror of Katrina and experiments with prospective futures: some dystopian, some tentatively more hopeful.
An installation gathering several recent works, Studies of a Meteor: Time & Space, includes a video projection of two large, revolving “dead” moons (Two Moons, 2021-2026) bifurcated by an asteroid whose trajectory is aimed at the centre of the gallery. There, a fragment of an actual meteor spins above a wooden desk, its chair ominously upturned (Meteor Study Desk, 2024-2026). The motif of the meteor evokes long-past moments of ecological destruction, when a meteor strike led to the extinction of dinosaurs.
In Dirt Bowl Table (2021) soil samples solicited from around the world are displayed in hand-turned wooden bowls; in Watermarkers for Venice and New Orleans (2006/2026), flood levels are marked using digital images embedded in tall acrylic slabs. Across these and other strategies, DeDeaux marks the costs of our relentless destruction of the planet while focusing at the same time on the plenitude and possibilities available to us today.
—Eva Díaz
