Ashley Hunt. Newspapers, 2005. Digital photograph. | Courtesy the artist.
Ashley Hunt, co-director of CalArts Program in Photography and Media, is an artist who uses video, photography, mapping and writing to engage social movements and facilitate public discourse.
As one of the selected artists for the Made in LA initiative, Hunt performs his solo piece, Notes on the Emptying of a City, at the Hammer Museum tonight (July 10) at 7:30 pm.
What begins as a traditional slideshow lecture about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, turns into a storytelling event, illustrated by photographs and video testimonies by New Orleans residents. The performance elicits complex questions about race, visibility and speech and ends with an audience discussion on those subjects.
From the artist’s website:
Exploring the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera and microphone in the months following the storm, it recounts Hunt’s engagement with community activists while researching the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison…Between meditations on his own experience he cues testimonies—videos of a citizen, a neighbor, an organizer and others—each one drawn from the archive of material compiled during his visits. The artist’s narration, still images and videos weave together as a live montage that offers a larger testimony on disaster, race, law, speech and witnessing at a time when the urgency of Katrina’s crisis seems to have receded into a comfortable past.
Tickets to Notes on the Emptying of a City are free and are available from the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office. One ticket per person.
Ashley Hunt Performance: Notes on the Emptying of a City
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
July 10 at 7:30 pm