Seven New Orleans-Affiliated Artists Making Work Between the Physical and Digital
By Virginia Walcott
November 10, 2025
Taylor Balkissoon, 444, 2025, HD video installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
Like all of the artists I spoke to for this article, I float between mediums, landing inside the physical and the digital as playgrounds of possibility. You edit a video to engineer a certain pace and quality of understanding, just as the shape and size of your imagery on canvas dictates what a viewer sees first, last, or all at once. It can seem like an almost necessary way to experience art making; a painting is a film scene is a song is a sculpture.
New Orleans is revered for its creativity. I'm captivated by what makes people feel comfortable working out of bounds, against easy definitions — and I wonder if something about the city creates an impulse towards multiplicity, a subconscious celebration of all that we contain.
Here are seven New Orleans-affiliated artists whose work reveals a capacity to draw bright and soft connections, weaving spaces of understanding and tunneling under closed doors. Their breadth of practice in connection to this place spans vibrant childhood memories, experiences forged outside of formal institutions, and deep social and political responsibilities.
Installation Image, Left: Trenity Thomas, Heavy Weight, 2021, digital photography, 60 x 40 inches, Right: Trenity Thomas, Lemon Boy and Cowboy, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
1. Trenity Thomas
Trenity Thomas incorporates symbol-laden memories of his New Orleans childhood into his work, from lemons and loquats to paper airplanes and a particular dog who chased everyone around the neighborhood. He’s prolific as both a figurative painter and photographer, and when I see the two together, I would never choose to separate them. Thomas refers to his respective mediums as “cousins” — they echo in dreamlike reflections, emphasizing the singular yet shared language of the other.
Installation View: Angela Lynn Tucker, Exceptional Negroes Lived Here, 2025, mixed media, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
2. Angela Lynn Tucker
Angela Lynn Tucker is deeply rooted in the film world, with accolades including the Emmys, Tribeca, BlackStar, New Orleans Film Festival, NBC, and Netflix, but her collage and installation work makes you understand what film is in the first place: a collection of disparate and related images, positioned in a way that ignites something deep within us. Initially seeking a way to express her artistry outside of the high paced intensity of film production, Tucker now realizes collage is what she was doing all along, whether filling a room with a multi-layered, montaged ode or experimenting with styles to bring back into the editing booth.
3. Jonathan Faulkner
Jonathan Faulkner uses language like music, sculpture like portraits. Growing up, objects in his orbit became symbols and VHS recordings were alive, a childhood “filled with imagination.” In Memories Picked to Play on Repeat, a nostalgia-laden scrolling, artificial, fish tank lamp is stripped down to its hardware and filled instead with cut paper clouds that float by forever. It feels like watching your life play back to you, at times strange and dampening as much as it is hopeful and devotional — our best attempt to conjure the magic vastness given to us in the sky above.
Jonathan Faulkner, Memories Picked to Play on Repeat, 2023, automated toy fish tank and cut paper clouds, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
4. Taylor Balkissoon
Taylor Balkissoon makes expansively poetic installations combining her lens-based work with collage, assemblage, and montage. Her early studies in photography transitioned naturally to video and “timeline-collapsing” work, a path she connects to the embedded multimedia fluency of living in the twenty-first century. In 444, a phone recording of a film playing on her grandmother’s TV shortly after her passing is displayed alongside an audiovisual mashup of “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz and Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” The personal is juxtaposed with distinct responses to our oppressive state, allowing both the artist and viewer to “simultaneously feel two different griefs.”
5. Daniela Leal
In a recent show at The Front gallery, Daniela Leal took her prowess as a photographer into the kitchen. Reflecting themes of generational memories passed down through food and ritual, she constructed a staggering rendition of her grandmother’s hands through a carefully molded dish of flan. Surrounding the richly lit photo of the flan sculpture were small forms made of eggshell compounds that intersected with a cascading cyanotype of her grandmother’s portrait, repeated and memorialized like a recipe worn with love.
6. Shabez Jamal
In Shabez Jamal’s work, photos embrace materials and compositions transform their surroundings. From archive to memory to present day, analog and digital intertwine in Jamal’s practice. Much of their work is concerned with how the history of photographic technologies became “essential to a way of image-making that is unique to marginalized communities.” The artist’s efforts to preserve and understand the photograph is especially important today — surrounded by more images than ever, we still struggle to grasp their construction, affect, and power, relying on artists like Jamal to help transform what we perceive as one dimensional into an entire world.
7. Jupiter Knoblach
Jupiter Knoblach often performs inside of a giant plastic sphere, navigating their way around swampy terrains that jut up against structures of the oil and gas industry. The resultant photos and videos of these acts become touchpoints for their sculptural work, building a world of plastic and petroleum-based edifices that question our surroundings in relation to the destructive qualities of institutions and industrialization. Grounded by a life-long love of learning and humored by the very idea of “sole authorship,” it feels natural in their practice to follow whimsy, bothness, and the “slow magic of time.”
Taylor Balkissoon, 444, 2025, HD video installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
Daniela Leal, Flan, 2024, archival pigment print, 21 x 31 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Shabez Jamal, Untitled (Page Reconstruction no. 104), 2023, Ink on archival paper, 24 x 19 1/4 inches framed, Edition of 5 plus 1 AP. Image courtesy the artist and Sibyl Gallery.
Jupiter Knoblach in collaboration with Kinsey S, Magenta Alert XI, 2023, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Photographed at Livaudais Bayou. Image courtesy of artist.