Other Plans Gallery Opens in New Orleans with Dual Exhibitions Exploring Destruction and Indigenous Cosmology

Other Plans gallery in New Orleans launched its program in January with two concurrent exhibitions exploring radical futurity. Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste's 'Break Stuff' exhibition features sculptural assemblages created from instruments destroyed during a performance, examining destruction's generative potential through references to metal, rock, and jazz traditions. The artist draws inspiration from Edouard Glissant's concepts of opacity and Créolité, as discussed in an interview with poet Kortney Morrow. Ana Hernandez's 'Color of Clouds' presents wall-mounted works on unprimed, hand-frayed canvas featuring grids with patterns based on precolonial Michoacán cosmology, using colors corresponding to cardinal directions and celestial bodies. Hernandez incorporates ASCII binary codes representing words like 'HUMANITY' and 'POWER' within her compositions, aiming to subvert binary thinking through Indigenous color systems. Her mixed-media series 'We Are (O, C, H, N, Ca, P)' uses nails and mirrored glass to spell atomic numbers of human body elements in ASCII, inspired by the 1974 Arecibo interstellar radio message. Both exhibitions remain on view through March 10, with Toussaint-Baptiste's performance involving an alto saxophone and upright bass smashed against concrete floors, resulting in fragments arranged in canvas gris-gris bags or black silicone pools for his S.L.A.B. series from 2024.