Artist Statement
My work explores issues of class and gender and how both reflect and shape our culture. I explore these issues by looking at the domestic sphere, especially as it relates to food and caregiving and the labor involved in both areas. That labor is traditionally and still typically considered women’s work. It’s often undervalued and, consequently, underpaid, as well as taken for granted and, therefore, relatively invisible, even though it’s labor-intensive, necessarily deliberate, often difficult and tedious and always crucial.
With respect to food, my paintings reflect on the symbolic role food can play, also as an indication of class, in how it’s produced, packaged, prepared, presented and consumed. Growing up in the 1980s, rural Midwest with health- and budget-conscious Italian and Jewish parents, I developed my own set of ideas and desires around food based on what I was allowed to eat and, just as influential, what I was not. But mixed messages from eating at friends’ houses or in the school cafeteria and seeing commercials for food and restaurants on television or billboards complicated my understanding of what was and wasn’t desirable. I've lived in Kentucky now for more than a dozen years and have adopted some regional tendencies as they relate to food, while others still seem foreign.
I am interested in how we individually or collectively celebrate or condemn food items and food-related activities based our social position, and how our attitudes are both contradictory and constantly in flux. My paintings question the implicit norms and customs that determine which foods we find acceptable or preferred and which ones we dismiss. The work explores the ways in which social norms governing our judgement of food and its production, preparation, presentation and consumption are arbitrary but have consequences — consequences in how we see food and activities surrounding it as good or bad, delightful or disgusting, clean or dirty or indicative of wealth or poverty. In dealing with these issues, my work explores how view ourselves and others.
For 20 years without a pause, solo and group exhibitions of Lori’s work have graced local, national and international venues. Her consistently evolving work has earned her multiple awards from the Great Meadows Foundation, SouthArts, Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Community Foundation of Louisville’s 2020 Fischer Prize for Visual Arts. Additionally, Lori has been awarded numerous residency fellowships from institutions including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, MacDowell, and chaNorth.
Lori Larusso earned her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) graduate interdisciplinary program, the Mount Royal School of Art and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). Lori’s work is represented by Skidmore Contemporary in Santa Monica, California and Mulberry & Lime in Lexington, Kentucky. She is a working artist based in Louisville, Kentucky.