In Reflection: A Conversation with Artist Dawn DeDeaux

To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans invited artist Dawn DeDeaux to reflect on her Water Markers installation located in the Hotel’s lobby. The piece memorializes the catastrophic flooding that reshaped the city and its people, capturing the literal, and emotional, waterlines left behind.

As a New Orleans native and visionary in contemporary art, DeDeaux brings both personal experience and artistic insight to this work. In the conversation below, she shares the inspiration behind Water Markers, her creative process, and how the memory of Katrina continues to influence her voice as an artist and citizen of this ever-evolving city.

What was the inspiration for the Series?

The sculpture series Water Markers was inspired by the cataclysmic event of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  

Describe the process of creating your sculptures

The works feature images of water embedded within thick polished slabs of acrylic.  The differing scale of the works corresponds directly to the wide range of flood heights reached in the numerous neighbourhoods that comprise New Orleans and South Louisiana.  Some lower-lying areas were more vulnerable and reflected in the titles  - all drawn from actual conversations I overheard in the days immediately following the storm's landfall, while waiting in lines for food supplies, water, gas and other emergency services needed amidst the disaster:  Nearly Eight Feet of Water...It Topped in Over Six... and We Got Twelve are titles that respond descriptively, in very personal ways, to a collective crisis.  

The surfaces of the Water Markers series are highly polished to reflect the viewer within the water imagery, and in some versions, the viewer seems to be underwater.  I wanted to increase the work’s visceral, experiential impact and commemorate the thousands of lives lost to the rising tide.

How did Hurricane Katrina shape your work as an artist and as a New Orleanian?

While the event of Hurricane Katrina was geographically specific, it reshaped my global and galactic vision.  New Orleans has always been romantically associated with its past, but now the future and its challenges dominate my sightline.  I am more intrinsically aware of our interconnectivity to the eco-systems of Earth and the external forces beyond.   

Most of my post-Katrina work reflects upon these meditations.

Is there a message you hope this piece quietly communicates to our Four Seasons guests?

New Orleans and its surrounds are built upon Earth's youngest landmass and is projected to be among the first modern-era human habitats to disappear.  With ongoing coastal erosion, floods and rising sea levels, New Orleans will likely one day return to the sea.  We are just passing through! 

I am honoured to have this high-profile installation and platform within the thoughtful Four Seasons environment to commemorate a significant historic event, our collective vulnerabilities and the necessities for responsible global stewardship.  I also wish to acknowledge exuberant, paradoxical Mother Nature: even in the wake of destruction, she gives us beauty. 

About the Artist
Dawn Ader DeDeaux has long been considered by many art critics to be a pioneer in synchronized, multi-installation, digital new media art as well as innovations melding sculpture and a variety of media, including Lucite, photography, and paper. Her iconic media-driven work is complex, layered, and unsettling, with razor-sharp social consciousness that explores human suffering, death and renewal, the environment, and urban violence. DeDeaux, a pioneer of new media art, grew up on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans next door to the Degas House, where the famed impressionist artist Edgar Degas lived and painted in the fall and winter of 1872 and 1873 while visiting relatives.

Born in New Orleans on June 28, 1952, DeDeaux became interested in art early in life. “Early grief and loss led me on a path aiming to reconcile love, suffering and spirit. I turned to art as a tool for investigation, and as a refuge for the heart.” Her first art lessons began at the age of thirteen with New York painter Laura Adams, who was visiting New Orleans and renting a room at the home of DeDeaux’s grandmother. DeDeaux later continued her art studies at the University of Colorado, Tulane University’s Newcomb School, and Louisiana State University. Because of her interest in conceptual art, she also studied mass communication theory at Loyola University in New Orleans and advanced digital technology at the University of New Orleans.