Photography Exhibition Batture Ritual, Jeff Whetstone

Julie Saul Gallery presents Batture Ritual, its fourth solo show featuring Jeff Whetstone. In 2016, Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art and Associate Director at the Nasher Museum at Duke University, invited Whetstone to participate in Prospect 4 the New Orleans triennial launched in 2008. Whetstone, a Tennessee native with a long career exploring the culture and environment of the South through photography, added a unique perspective to the exhibiton. We will present a variation of the P4 exhibition, which was hosted by the University of New Orleans, St. Claude Gallery.

Jeff Whetstone’s photographs and videos explore the micro- and macro-economies and ecologies along the Mississippi River’s batture near New Orleans, Louisiana. “Batture” is the French-creole term for the thin strip of weeds, trees, and mud between the water’s edge of the Mississippi River and the tall, hardened levees that contain its floods. The batture is ephemeral. It disappears when the river is high and re-emerges when the tide falls; it is swept and transformed. It is a cyclical land, untied to human time, unclaimed, and unowned, a temporary alluvial wilderness. Families fishing for food come within feet of international oil tankers and container ships that facilitate global trade. Whetstone does not depict the batture as a dividing line, but rather a magnet that draws all manner of life into contact.