Lori Larusso is an American visual artist working primarily with themes of domesticity and foodways. Her body of work encompasses paintings and installations that explore issues of class, gender, and anthropocentrism, and how these practices both reflect and shape culture. Larusso’s work is exhibited widely in the US and is included in various public collections such as KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, 21c Museum, as well as noteworthy private collections. She has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, and MacDowell where she received a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship. She is a recipient of the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Fellowship, Kentucky South Arts Fellowship, and multiple grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Lori Larusso earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). She currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.

Artist Statement:

The significance of cake. Roses by the dozen. Eco takeout. Cash and Carry. These are fragments in the panoply of consumables, customs, stories and assumptions that shape a life. They circulate in a market of meaning that changes across time and place. From one generation to the next, they generate desire, signify identities and stimulate fears as they frame and embody our human ways of relating with ourselves and one another.

The fragments matter, even when they look like minutiae. They are the foods that bring us together and the food rules that make us strangers, if not adversaries. They are the animals we love, worship, fear or despise. They are surfaces and textures that mean everything or nothing, and the ones that somehow mean both. They are the objects that make us: some make us look good; some make us feel guilty; some tell our secrets; some make us want more.

My artistic practice is influenced by the particular panoply that shaped me, that informs my fascination with the human tendency to project, communicate, and exploit the currency of things. Paradoxically, I’m captivated by the tangible qualities of objects— those here-and-now phenomena that speak viscerally, in their own language. It’s not the meaning of the flower in the vase; it’s how the color responds to light, how glass reflects it and water distorts it, each in their own way, always in flux.

The work of painting allows me to experience an object intimately, explore subject matter through mediated forms, then pick and choose what to render, and how. It also offers me space to question social customs (even the ones I delight in) and to consider discrepancies between cultural codes, human aspirations and actual realities. I’m aware that the translations of reality I construct are themselves consumable, marketable artifacts—bound to circulate and have impacts in ways I cannot predict or control.