Metatron Monarch Medallion won 2nd place at Art Melt!

This August I will be attending the Quench Residency at Ayatana Artists' Research Program. We will be doing a week long of water activities.

review of the La Femme Exhibit by JOHN D’ADDARIO in the New Orleans Advocate

GROUP SHOW
LA FEMME
(NEW ORLEANS ART CENTER)
You’ll never catch me kvetching about a group gallery show of entirely female artists, let alone local female artists. This is certainly true of La Femme at the New Orleans Art Center, although the show completely lacks any unifying curatorial theme aside from gender and location—not to mention the fact that the pieces presented number in the hundreds. This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you came for: everyone from the DIY scene all the way down to Julia Street is represented. Artemis Antippas emblazons oversize briefs with sparkly applique patches in Undies; Guissel Giuliano photographs lonely broken plastic consumer pieces (the end of a rake, a snarl of balloons) in lush, suburban-looking greenery. Muffin Bernstein rearranges photographed butterflies and plants into kaleidoscopic medallions. Cherice Harrison Nelson lends her hot pink Mardi Gras Indian suit that she paraded in Muses with this year to the collection. Gina Phillips paints an utterly charming portrait of Mabel On Her Way To Mass in almost cartoonish commemoration of the characters of the Crescent City. The impetus behind La Femme appears twofold: first, to call attention to female artists in a man’s world, and second, to set up a flea market for arts patrons—though I can’t really say either of those are bad things. —Brooke Schueller

"New Orleans-based digital artist Muffin Bernstein grows a garden of indigenous and adopted South Louisiana plants, such as banana trees, satsuma trees, blueberry bushes, and mirlitons. Bernstein photographs and scans parts of the plants, & fowers and fruits, as a record of each plant’s production. She then digitally collages her photo fragments using 17th century Tibetan mandalas as a framework. Bernstein’s plants are a natural fit, as Tibetan monks have long made ephemeral sacred circles out of flowers and plants. Within one mandala she uses, say, a satsuma slice for a disc shape, a seed for a crescent or teardrop shape, leaves and petals in arcs, stems in lines, and so on, until the whole growth cycle of a plant is embedded in the image. The Tibetan designs she studies not only incorporate plant matter, but their structure reverberates the radial symmetry and balance of the sacred geometric sequence that is a natural blueprint for outward growth—spirals, forks, stems, seeds, and centers found within cross sections of fruit-slices. Bernstein’s source is as “earthly,” as “deep,” as “the rock cut out” to topple the statue in the Book of Daniel.
Though visually complex, the mandalas’ return is simple. The plants of New Orleans—bananas, mirlitons, satsumas— give Bernstein life through actual nourishment, necessary food. And the harmony of the images radiates back out thanksgiving. Bernstein’s materials teach. Her process teaches her, and she teaches her audience through her result. Her visually radiant images allow for fuller dimensionality than if her images were only made of color and shape fragments that resembled plant parts but were not representative of any known object.
Perhaps integrity of materials generates harmony. " by Georgia Kennedy

review by Georgia Kennedy on nola.com's blog NolaVie

Okra Mandala Detail was the Pelican Bomb's Pic(k) of the Week

This week in Sarasota, Feb 13, 2020 featured Look and Breathe by Muffin Bernstein