April Bachtel and Wesley Chavis, 2017-2018 AIR’s at St. Roch Community Church, present, “Look Up at the Ground” a selection of objects and live performance at Staple Goods artist collective. The show explores experiences within the artists’ bodies and challenges narratives associated with their inherited identities. Chavis explores everyday touch and sensuous physicality to evoke layered sensations of love and loss that flow from communing black humans – seeking home, rest, warmth, and God. Bachtel practices repair by collaborating with found objects and traditional art materials. She uses catharsis and humor to revitalize hope for the discarded. Their works come together to create small fissures that interrupt linear ways of thought and make room to reexamine dominant Western culture.

April Bachtel is a visual artist residing in New Orleans, LA. She was raised on a small wooded farm near Akron, Ohio where she was born (1988). As a child, she watched her father create lumber and then furniture from trees in their yard, while her mother worked as a nightshift nurse in labor and delivery. Early proximity to these transformations are the foundations from which she works. Her practice combines the languages of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture with the everyday objects and materials. April studied Painting and Art Education at Kent State University in Ohio (2012) and Painting and Drawing at University of Tennessee (2014). She has exhibited her work regionally and nationally in the United States. She is currently an artist in residence at the St. Roch Community Church. 

Wesley Chavis is a visual artist and vocalist living in New Orleans, LA. Currently, he is participating in the St. Roch Community Church Artist-in-Residence Program. He received a BA from Yale and recently graduated with an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth Univ. His original home is Beaumont, Texas. There resides the ancestral root of the love he receives, nurtures, returns, and interrogates through artworks.