DC ROLL CALL

Katrina Inspires Art
Capitol Hill Home Is Canvas for 'Cajun Christmas' Project
By Kathrine Schmidt
Roll Call Staff
January 18, 2006

"They placed the rich on high, the poor and middlin' they laid low."
These words weave among the painted swirls of murky colors and the
anguished faces in local artist Laura Elkins' depiction of Hurricane
Katrina's devastation.

Elkins is certainly not the first to put brush to canvas over a
natural disaster, but her project does hit closer to home.
Elkins' own Capitol Hill row house is the literal canvas for her
recent work, "A Cajun Christmas." For it, Tyvek house wrap - a common
insulation material - is painted with waves of color, intending to
make the Civil-War era home appear as though it had sustained the
wrath of Katrina's floods.
Elkins and her family are former residents of northern Louisiana, but
they all moved to Washington, D.C., six years ago with the work of her
husband, John Robbins, who now works as a deputy administrator for the
National Gallery of Art.
Elkins, now a full-time artist, has used her architecture degree from
the University of Virginia to develop a variety of hybrid art and
architecture projects.
She was in search of a new project late last year when she happened on
a John Singleton Copley painting in the National Gallery titled
"Watson and the Shark."
The painting's muddy, swirling depiction of a young Cuban fisherman
under attack by a shark made her realize she "had to do something with
water." When she heard about Katrina's devastation, she decided to
help, by transforming her house with her painting and then planning to
eventually sell the work to benefit New Orleans charities.
Elkins took about a week in her backyard studio to paint her own
rendition of the devastation in acrylics onto 9-foot-wide strips of
Tyvek house wrap. The strips were then fastened to the house for
display, and an explanatory card was fixed to the cast-iron fence in
front of her house.
Loss is made acute during the holidays' time of plenty, hence the
Christmas theme that runs through the piece.
According to Elkins, those unfamiliar with Louisiana must know that
"Christmas lights are just so important there, it's just carpeted in
Christmas lights during the holiday season."
Christmas lights are also installed behind Elkins' canvas to give off
a gloomy green nighttime glow, giving the impression of a holiday
display submerged.
Holiday colors are also incorporated throughout the picture: Bright
red globes rise through the muddy green waves that rise halfway up the
second-floor windows and past the ghostly alligator lurking in the
shadows.
Elkins soon intends to sell the canvas away in pieces - 1-foot square
or 6-inch square, which she sees as appropriate to the brokenness that
survivors faced. "To me, that's a metaphor of what happened to the
people. Everybody gets a piece, nobody sees the whole thing," she
said.
The exact arrangements for the painting's division and sale are still
pending, but Elkins has been in dialogue with the Baton Rouge Area
Foundation about donating the proceeds to their cause.
Elkins said she has received mainly positive feedback on her home's
unusual holiday getup. "It's a way to share with the public, a way to
share it with people who might never go into a gallery or a museum,"
she said.
She called her projects "private home as public art."
The ubiquitous presence of politics in Washington, Elkins said, made
her "more aware of the effect of political actions on the domestic
realm."
This notion of private home as a public display, she said, was also a
reflection of the increasingly entwined nature of home and working
life.
"Cajun Christmas" is the latest in a series of Elkins' works titled
HOME wRAP, which incorporates elements from both painting and
architecture to address the "the politization of private life and the
demise of domesticity," according to a statement on her Web site.
Other paintings in this series including another Tyvek House Wrap
painting she attached to the front of her home in October 2005 and an
exhibition currently on display at Washington's Warehouse Gallery.
Elkins' Home - and its Cajun Christmas display, which can be viewed
through Jan. 28 - is located at 20 Ninth St. NE. Learn more about the
project at Elkins' Web log, http://cajunchristmas.blogspot.com .