‘Vestigial’ traits – Previewing an exhibit at the new Walls Project space

For Jesse Guillory’s show at the Walls Project’s new space downtown, the LSU art student didn’t want to hold back—on the audience or himself.

“I’m interested in creating a visceral response to the work. I’m not interested in making work that’s ‘beautiful’ or ‘cute.’ I want people to understand that I’m frustrated,” he says.

The show, called “Vestigial,” is focused on photography, with Guillory himself as the subject. During an early April meeting in the Walls Project‘s new Art & Design Center at 451 Florida St., Guillory met with Elevator Projects’ Raina Wirta, who co-curated the show. He brought out dozens of Polaroids of himself—each image played with the show’s larger themes of gender identity and masculinity.

On a few Polaroids, scratch marks and graffiti obscured his naked body, while larger images depicted Guillory in ways that provocatively altered his physique. Other images seemed to turn the focus away from Guillory to the world around him, depicting friends of the artist starkly lit and in mid-scream looking directly at the camera.

“[The show] comes from a place that’s true to my personal experiences,” Guillory says.

As a Creole, Guillory says he wanted to address the social challenges and internal struggles he’s faced in terms of race, religion and masculinity. That brought him back to childhood and the games he’d play with his sister where they imagined themselves as other people, even putting powder on their faces to pretend they were white.

Artist Jesse Guillory and Elevator Projects’ Raina Wirta sort through some of the
images Guillory plans to use for his show at the Walls Project.

“We moved around a lot, and my sister and I, we were very much latchkey children. We would build forts in the living room or in the kitchen,” he says. “It created a place of stability and support for us, and I learned a thing or two about playing characters.”

He brings that childhood memory to life with a blanket fort built in the Walls Project space, projecting images onto the fabrics. In all of these presentations, Guillory says he was “thinking about photography in a sculptural way” and trying to let the viewer move around the images, rather than just seeing an image hung up on a wall. “It’s so much more relatable that way, I think,” he says.

Guillory’s exhibit, “Vestigial,” opens Saturday with a reception 7 p.m.-11 p.m. Find out more about the show here.