NEXT PHASE Featured Works
ANDREA LANE AINSWORTH: Cream of the Earth
“Cream of the Earth is a soft, immersive installation combining painting, sculpture, poetry, and sound. It explores softness as a form of strength. Through delicate textures, muted colors, and gentle gestures, the work honors sensitivity, slowness, and feeling.
I am drawn to the beauty of little moments: sunlight dancing through trees, fabric flowing in a breeze, water gathered in flowers after rain. My work leans into that sense of wonder and the awareness that nature can be nurturing, healing, and inspiring.
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The installation is meant to offer a slower, softer space that expands the senses through movement, texture, light, and sound. My hope is that visitors experience a soothing and joyful connection to the beauty and possibility already alive within us.”
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ASHER REY LEWIS: Idle Memory
Idle Memory is an installation-based artwork rooted in nostalgia, woven together with fantasy and storytelling. At its center is Memory – a pink-haired doll – dwelling within a dreamlike habitat inspired by southern Louisiana. Murals transform this corner of the world into a fever dream, a headspace that is both an entry and an escape. Through the intertwining of mediums, art, and ritual, Idle Memory constructs an isolated worldwhere stillness, rest, and healing are honored, inviting our inner child to experience embrace.
Asher Rey utilized a number of new mediums, crafting a seven foot, fabric doll to exist within a mural of stretching Southern landscapes. She brought on a number of creative advisors, who assisted her with crafting a unique soundtrack that plays from the doll’s head.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
JACK BUDD: Between Identity and the Natural World
Jack’s work in Next Phase continues an exploration of transformation, symbolism, and the line between human identity and the natural world. In projects such as Slugs and Tree, Budd investigated how ritual, play, and found materials can shift into magical encounters. (In New Orleans and South Louisiana, Mardi Gras beads are often seen adorning trees long after parades, where they take on an otherworldly presence.) By recontextualizing these cultural remnants, Budd articulates the ways meaning accumulates through tradition and chance, how objects become vessels for memory, myth, and ambiguity.
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This body of work expands those interests through a constellation of works, including Fetishes and Saint, both collections of objects and images gathered from queer participants who were asked: What object holds memory, spiritual significance, or obsession for you? Alongside a series of prints inspired by alchemy, psychology, and the fluidity of natural forms, these works probe the connections between personal authenticity and collective meaning-making. Gender fluidity, desire, and transformation resonate through both human and nonhuman symbols, suggesting that identity, like nature, is always in process. Budd’s practice reflects on how significance is carried, exchanged, and transformed across people, rituals, and environments.
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JULIE GLASS: Deconstructed
Julie is interested in the intersection of materials, processes, visuals, and ideas. Her work is inspired by ideas such as quantum physics and communication. In quantum physics, particles can be anywhere at any time, so it is theorized that parallel universes could exist. One of the key themes of her work is the idea that there are infinite possibilities both in assemblage art and in life. If everyone knew they might live every other person’s life, empathy would abound. Her wood collage work allows for infinite combinations of colors, patterns and ideas.
For this exhibition, Glass is exploring a new process of deconstructing previous sculptures in order to liberate the components and allow them to become elements for new sculptures and installation works. The process of dismantling an older work has generated new ideas about composition, negative space and movement. This physical process of deconstruction is inspired by the concept that one’s life is sometimes in need of dismantling, reconfiguring, and re-thinking. A willingness to do so can lead to the Next Phase. The new phase may be great or it may be imperfect, but will always lead to new possibilities.
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LEX R. THOMAS: Enmeshed: An Internal Wilderness
Enmeshed: An Internal Wilderness is a contemporary installation that expands upon Internal Wilderness, Thomas’ prior painting series. It explores the psychological landscape of familial entanglement, generational trauma, and personal grief through immersive, spatial storytelling. Drawing from visual and material cues in organic textures, domestic symbols, and transparent structures, they evoke the delicate, concealed terrain of internal struggle.
Visitors are invited to move through the installation physically and emotionally. Close reflection is encouraged in specific zones, allowing viewers to engage with texture, obscurement, and tension. The space aims to invite reflection on one's own emotional inheritance and family dynamics.
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Created for Next Phase, the work marks Thomas’ exploration of new mediums, alongside the reconceptualizing of individual pieces into a broader, more immersive series.
LINDSAY MCANALLY: Memory, Grief, and Impermanence
In creating this participatory installation, Lindsay McAnally extends her practice of working with memory, grief, and impermanence into an installation built from objects gathered both from her own life and from the lives of others. Many of these objects evoke nostalgia and longing, fragments that still carry the weight of loss. By inviting others to contribute items tied to their experiences with grief, McAnally creates a shared archive of what remains after departure. Each object becomes a vessel, calling attention to the tangible ways we continue to connect with those who are no longer present.
Moving through the installation, viewers encounter a search for meaning and memory in With My Little Eye. These offerings chart different stages of mourning: the searching for signs, the solitude of keeping objects close, and the vulnerability of sharing grief with others. The work culminates in a quiet memorial, an echo of when the party is over, when someone has left. This asks us to reflect on the fragile and yet lasting ties between the living and the departed. In holding space for collective grief, McAnally’s work urges us to cherish the presence of one another more deeply, while we can.
LUCIA MOON: When the Visions Started
When the Visions Started is a short film inspired by comparative mythology and the recurring archetypes and symbols that emerge throughout the history of myth. In an increasingly complicated world, stories like this mirror the collective human psyche and help us make sense of our place in both the world and universe.
Filmed and edited in a matter of five frenzied days, When the Visions Started unfolds as a hazy, dream-like journey into the unknown –where our shadows must be confronted, Jungian-style, in order to understand the true nature of our internal reality. The film seeks to transform fantasies of the past into a modern yet timeless setting, compelling viewers to reflect on the archetypal roles they embody within their own lives.
Influenced by David Lynch, the film draws on the longstanding narrative of the hero’s journey, depicting the uncanny twists, restless investigation, and pursuit of truth that shape it. When the Visions Started reminds us that the myths we inherit are not relics, but living maps of the psyche, still at work within us today.
MEGAN TRAN: Romanticizing Lafayette
Megan’s Next Phase project reflects her ongoing pursuit to “fall in love” with her own life, particularly her experiences in Lafayette. Rooted in portraiture, drawing, and collage, her work takes everyday moments and familiar surroundings to turn them into tender, magical compositions. For this exhibition, Megan combines photographs of Lafayette with layered pen-and-ink drawings that overlay images of her family and loved ones. These intimate collages show the personal and communal connections that define her sense of place.
Through these works, Megan explores memory, love, and community. Each piece acting as both a heartfelt reflection and a celebration, framing the familiar through a lens of gratitude, beauty, and wonder. By presenting the ordinary and intimate as almost magical, her practice invites viewers to notice the small, meaningful moments in their own lives and to reflect on the relationships and spaces that shape them.
MYA BUDDEN: Sanctuary II
“Anorexia and body dysmorphia have made their presence known throughout my life for almost a decade. Leaning into the romanticization of eating disorders through a hyperbolically cute creature, Sanctuary I & II focus on the feeling that this being is living inside of me. An otherworldly embodiment of anorexia, it continues to feed and thrive off of parts of myself as I sink deeper into disorder, slowly creating its own habitat.
As the viewer is faced with this vaguely childlike figure, both cute and disgusting, they are faced with the decision of showing it admiration or neglect while it is fed by its new environment. In this self-made sanctuary, grounded far away from reality, its inhabitant is nourished by everything that life with an eating disorder has taken from me.”
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EMPOWERING SOUTHERN ARTISTS - EQUITABLE COMPENSATION - CULTIVATING A RELIABLE NETWORK OF CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS - REJUVENATING LOUSIANA'S ARTS SECTOR