JEFF WHETSTONE – BATTURE RITUAL
2018-10-08Jeff 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 animals and industry, fishermen and ocean ships, all manner of life into contact.
Opposite – The Eastern Hope, 2017
Exhibition runs through to October 27th, 2018
Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York
10011 NY