Laura Litten

AMERICAN BLING

The favorite discoveries of my childhood-- -coyote bones, skulls, cattails, and a corner of shiny fabric-- -are the catalysts for the storytelling imagination of my youth. In American Bling, I pair natural objects with gold lamé fabric to connect our own prairies and woodlands to those earlier landscapes of indigenous America and Americans. What is the relationship between our ‘natural’ or ‘native’ wilderness and the shiny fabric of the casinos, reminiscent of the long-ago allure of the Gold Rush?
Above all, I put my trust in the physical materials.  I surrender to the provocations of working with the fragility of bones, thread, and the unwieldy strength of zippers-- -and wresting meaning from the mix. Figures relax into abstractions, while vivid colors drip and pool around sewing-work. I discover meaning in that process. For me, truth is revealed in the clash of contradictory materials, which opens up an arena of local magic, a peculiar kind of American Bling.

Artist's Reception:  Saturday, October 28, 4-6 pm

First Friday Reception:  Friday, November 3, 6-8pm

Fotoweek

Abstraction/Representation: Deconstructing the Photographic Index

Photography is traditionally considered an accurate and true representation of reality. Even in the age of digital manipulation and Photoshop, the vast majority of viewers interpret a photographic image as a reliable index of what appeared before the camera at the moment the picture was captured. Is this so? Isn’t a photograph, even the most documentary, an abstraction of the world as it truly is? For the past several decades, conceptual photographers have explored the border between abstraction and representation in a variety of ways. This Studio Gallery show, curated by Leena Jayaswal of American University, illustrates how a number of the area’s most creative photographers are grappling with this always timely problem.

The photographers in the show:

Iwan Bagus
Steven Marks
Leena Jayaswal
Shaun Schroth
Alexandra Silverthorne
Rania Razek
Joanne Levine

First Friday Reception:  Friday, November 3, 6-8pm

Artists' Receptions:  Saturday, November 11, 4:30-6:30 pm