Flight

STAGES OF TRANSCENDENCE -
Sculptor Jeff Becker's twin exhibits beautifully blend a stage designer's sense of drama with a post-K sense of dread
Friday, December 21, 2007
By Doug MacCash, Art critic
The students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts may be just high-school age. But a list of their visual arts teachers reads like a university faculty. Keith Perelli, Erzy Schwartz, Mary Jane Parker, Courtney Egan: The roll call of instructors is a list of some of the most accomplished artists in the Crescent City.
NOCCA sculpture teacher Jeff Becker is best known for his ambitious, inventive stage designs that date back to the 1990s. Times-Picayune theater critic David Cuthbert described Becker's set for ArtSpot's 2004 production of "Maid of Orleans" as a "brilliant piece of stagecraft," including a "whirling circular platform . . . ingeniously refashioned into a gyroscope."
Becker, 44, sees the ingenious, toy-like sculpture he's produced over the past two years as models for possible future stage designs. Clusters of miniature bombs hang beneath a tiny couch, bed and easy chair. The small-scale furniture hangs like surrealistic porch swings beneath the wings of abstract stealth bombers. Marionettes, holding bells in their tiny hands, balance precariously atop tall metal towers that sway back and forth on rounded bottoms. Other marionettes are carried toward the heavens by old-fashioned hot air balloons.
Becker envisions real live actors someday seated on life-sized versions of his dangling furniture, rocking atop his towers and swaying beneath his balloons. He probably has the skills to pull it off.
From welded iron, to cast paper pulp, to poured bronze, to embossed metal repousse, Becker has mastered myriad sculptural techniques. But he tells his students that technique shouldn't be their first concern.
"Don't worry about the how," he tells them, "worry about the what."
The what, in Becker's recent works, is flight.
"I'm intrigued by how our desire to fly has created innovations and consequences that are ongoing and unpredictable," he said.
But he's not just interested in flight as it pertains to aircraft; he's interested in flight in the sense of fleeing danger. Becker and his family fled Hurricane Katrina to Charleston, S.C., where they spent three months on what he sarcastically calls a "hurrication."
He said he didn't exactly set out to create metaphors for New Orleans' jarring experience when he returned to art making. But like so many artists, the trauma seeped into his work anyway.
As Becker pointed out, a pair of feet being carried aloft by wings brings to mind the helicopter rescue of so many stranded citizens. A cow borne by a hot air balloon implies a search for "greener pastures." The suitcases and figurines that dangle from balloons at the Contemporary Arts Center symbolize "people and possessions that are caught in some state of limbo awaiting eventual transcendence."
For Becker, transcendence has come sooner. The beautifully made, whimsical objects in his pair of exhibits deftly describe the longing for deliverance so many of us in post-Katrina New Orleans still have somewhere deep in our hearts.
Though Becker has shown his sculpture regularly in local group shows, the current twin shows represent a solo breakout for the high-flying artist, who says he will translate some of the designs into stage sets for an Artspot production titled "Flight" at the CAC in June.