LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — I first noticed Lori Larusso’s work in 2004, when she was a graduate pupil within the MFA program on the Maryland Institute Faculty of Artwork (MICA) and I used to be ending my final semester of instructing there. Earlier than I left, I did one thing unprecedented for myself: I purchased two of her work. One portrayed a melting chocolate ice cream cone with a childlike face, positioned upside-down on a dish, and the opposite was of two frosted coconut desserts set in opposition to a creamy white floor. What made them greater than robust work by a gifted grad pupil was that Larusso had seamlessly merged lush, flat, unblended areas of acrylic paint along with her curiosity in consumption, waste, gratification, and leisure, leading to graphically exact depictions of anthropomorphic desserts.
After leaving MICA, I stayed in contact with Larusso, and adopted her on Fb and Instagram, however I didn’t see her work once more in particular person till 2023, after I visited Louisville, the place she had relocated to show. She had made a reputation for herself within the metropolis, and whereas I used to be on the town I noticed her wall set up, “A Pastiche of Good Intentions and Other Parties”(2019), on view within the foyer of KMAC Modern Artwork Museum. Whereas meals has been a by way of line in her artwork over the previous 20 years, it’s clear that she has explored completely different potentialities, as she has grow to be more proficient as a painter.
After I returned to Louisville this previous February for the Louisville Convention on Literature and Tradition, I stayed an additional day to cease at Larusso’s studio. Over the course of the morning, I noticed three our bodies of labor, two accomplished and one in progress for her first museum exhibition, A Paradox of Loads, opening on the Arkansas Museum of Effective Arts on August 26. Considering Larusso’s mastery of colour relationships in tandem along with her lengthy preoccupation with consumption and waste, I’m reminded of how a lot attention-grabbing artwork I’ve seen in numerous cities I’ve visited as a poet, and the way little of it’s proven on each coasts.
Lori Larusso, “Bourbon Rocks on Red” (2025)
“Bourbon Rocks on Red” (2025) typifies Larusso’s formal facility with colour, which includes one pressure of her artwork. Set in opposition to a crimson floor, and casting a maroon shadow, the cylindrical glass consists of interlocking crimson, pink, maroon, brown, and tan shapes, overlaid with small white accents. “Bourbon Rocks on Red” is each a tactile and a perceptual floor that sits comfortably on the dividing line between abstraction and illustration with out favoring both facet. This and different work on this collection jogged my memory of the road in John Ashbery’s nice poem, “Soonest Mended”: “a kind of fence-sitting/Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.”
For her collection Ladyface Vase (1 – 14) (2024), Larusso depicts flowers in painted ceramic vases initially made by the California ceramicist and artist Betty Lou Nichols, who started creating head vases of film actresses at her kitchen desk within the late Nineteen Forties. These ceramic caricatures turned so widespread that at one level she had two-dozen workers, they usually spawned many knock-offs earlier than the fad pale within the late Sixties.
Nichols adopted a method: Every face had massive black eyelashes hiding downcast eyes, and a closely lipsticked mouth. In Larusso’s painings, the bouquets rising from their elaborate hairdos or behatted heads are typically blooming and different occasions wilting or dried up. Representing a Euro-American excellent of magnificence and glamour, the faces had been based mostly on well-known Hollywood actresses resembling Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield, and Marilyn Monroe.
Lori Larusso, “(04) Ladyface Vase” (2024)
Formally, as with the glasses of bourbon, Larusso’s flowers are an exploration of colour relationships. However the head vase work additionally convey her curiosity within the energy dynamics between men and women, the male gaze, and the way society’s notion of refinement could make a shopper wish to possess an object modeled on a film actress, somebody who is basically a fantasy determine.
Larusso is a socially and politically aware artist however she by no means proclaims her intentions. Her conceptualization of specific themes — from wild animals’ adaption to human environments the place meals is extensively accessible to the methods we disguise and adorn meals — could be humorous and unsettling, as in arranging broccoli stalks to make an outsized coiffed poodle, which we see within the set up “A Pastiche of Good Intentions and Other Parties.”
What has modified over the previous 20 years is Larusso’s deepening curiosity in how shopper society processes meals and pictures in order that they grow to be surrogates and substitutes. In rigorous and pressing pursuit of this preoccupation, she depicts an more and more askew consumer-driven world riddled with false guarantees.
Lori Larusso, “Midden” (2025)
In “Midden” (2025), Larusso depicts a useless deer whose open abdomen reveals a pile of trash. Taking a deadpan method, her unlikely, eye-catching, grotesque juxtaposition is each comical and grim. Shut scrutiny of the trash reveals a pc keyboard, plastic fork, plastic espresso cup lid, plastic-wrapped lollipop, Kleenex field, waffle, tube of lipstick, and sneaker with bubble gum stretched on its sole. As a result of a few of these issues are extra readable than others, the attention should consistently refocus. Larusso has inverted the trope of humankind consuming nature within the deer’s unwitting consumption of human-made junk.
Equally, “Binge and Purge” (2025) portrays a mound of things piled up beneath a vertically oriented procuring cart. On the high of the triangular mound is a teddy bear cut up open and spilling out keys, a package deal of condoms, a screwdriver, and cash. The opposite issues embody a carved pumpkin, a take-out espresso cup, a espresso pot, work gloves, and a pantyhose container. Are these items that somebody simply purchased or rubbish? Along with her consideration to packaging, Larusso means that within the cycle of consumption and waste that’s central to each civilization, capitalism has inverted the connection by purging waste that’s extra indestructible than what it binges.
Lori Larusso, “Binge and Purge” (2025)
