Margaret Evangeline at the Hilliard Art Museum and at Heriard-Cimino

The New York-based, Louisiana-born artist Margaret Evangeline dedicated two recent exhibitions to New Orleans and the victims of Katrina and Rita, showing work that invoked the disasters both obliquely and straight on, pitting human hope and vulnerability against nature's inexorability and indifference.

At the Hilliard, Evangeline created an extremely handsome installation of seven works--or rather nine, counting her signature pile of expended bullet casings, memento mori to be taken home by the viewer, and also a shiny stainless-steel sign with the name of the show, "Dodge a Bullet," posted at the gallery's entrance. Written in flowing metallic script, the ironic title quotes President Bush, who glibly reported soon after Katrina struck that New Orleans had been spared. Once Upon a Time, America/eXile (2006) is a two-part video, the first part of which shows the artist firing a rifle at her own reflection in a metal panel suspended among trees. In the second section, she wears sexy (Stella McCartney) stiletto boots while walking over empty bullet cartridges, accompanied by the ping and crunch of the bullets and by a blues score.

Almost all of the other works at the Hilliard were made of large panels of polished stainless steel punctured by gunshot, the glamour of the material undimmed by the injuries done to it. Lightning #1 (2006) is an 8-by-2 1/2-foot wall piece made from a double stack of 14 mirror-bright stainless-steel panels, seven on each side. A pale blue-violet fluorescent light runs vertically through its center, the fluorescence suggesting a streak of minimalist lightning (Judd and Andre meet Flavin). Lightning #2 (2006) is a lovely, gently undulating strip of thin, luminous blue-violet NeoFlex held by silvery metal bows, like the tail of a kite. Kite forms figured in two other wall pieces, suggesting a weather gauge of sorts--a measure of the wind's benevolence or violence-and also an innocent pastime and a surrogate for flight. In Shotgun (2006), a shimmering freestanding outline of a traditional shotgun house, drawn with childlike simplicity in immaculate stainless steel, is set on rusty steel skids with casters. Another poignant image in precarious balance, it conjures up impermanence and all the homes (and lives) lost to the storms but also, in its resolute brightness, a dream of a new beginning.

At the Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans--one of the few galleries in the beleaguered city to have reopened so far--those same gorgeous boots appear in a 2005 version of the eXile video, and also in the 2006 Wade in the Water, a series of 4-foot-square digital photos on canvas over-painted with acrylic (the title comes from a celebrated Underground Railroad spiritual). The remainder of the show consisted of "Exiles" (2006), a series of luminous abstract paintings in acrylic on foil-faced foam board (one of these was also shown at the Hilliard). Their constellated surfaces, gouged by pointed heels, are much more beautiful than they sound--Fontana feminized and politicized. One large silvery lilac work is especially ravishing, a fitting tribute to the stylish, sensuous, devastated but undefeated city that Evangeline loves.

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