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Louviere + Vanessa |
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Satan once said “the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”. Louviere + Vanessa make their home and art in New Orleans. Their work effectively combines the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They utilize Holgas, scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and blood. Since they began professionally showing in 2004, they have been in 40 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in private collections world wide, including theOgden Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art | Houston and the Photomedia Center as well as the film archive for Globians International Film in Potsdam Germany and Microcinema in San Francisco. Six images from the Creature series were recently acquired by the George Eastman House for an exhibit that will travel the world through 2010. They experiment in moving pictures and have created the first movie shot with a plastic Holga camera consisting of 1,900 frames. Based on that film, they were hired to shoot the animation sequence for Roseanne Cash’s latest music video, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. In addition, they just finished a super 8mm music video for the Norwegian composer, KAADA for his new album, Music for Moviebikers. Jeff Louviere is from New Orleans, Vanessa is from New York and they met each other half-way in Savannah. Jeff graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design during which he and 3 other artists created the world’s largest painting, a 76,000 square foot image of Elvis which was included in the Guinness Book of World Records. Vanessa began photographing at age 12 and won a Kodak International Award of Excellence in Photography when she was 17. She photographed throughout Italy and Greece before graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Photography. Louviere + Vanessa’s tableaux vivant series, Slumberland, began in 2003 and continues still. It is a collection of separate narratives existing as dialogue between the couple. In 2005, they started on their Creature series, a singular story told through many faces and as such the opposite of the Slumberland series. They have a long fascination with themes of duality and paradox: beauty as horror, creation as destruction, the personal as a universal. Craft and concept are the devices they use to explore the gray zone within those themes. Jeff returned to New Orleans with Vanessa in 1998. The impetus for their collaborations began as a series of tableaus created to resemble New Orleans crime scenes. They made their collaboration official by getting married in Switzerland during the winter of 2000. They own an 1800’s home in the historic Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans (which survived the hurricane) doing what they love with their two camera-brash German Shepherds and lots of great friends. They’re making their Heaven. SLUMBERLAND | artists’ statement
“If functions can be given any meaning in art, then our art’s function is the testing of personal observations, convictions, and moods through our ability to communicate them–to make the personal universal, and vice versa. By collaborating, we put ourselves in the midst of alternating currents of decision and production, action and responsibility, decay and clarity–capturing the moment between ‘has been’ and ‘what will be.’” Their art begins, as many good stories do, with the word. It may be angel or leaf, fire or perhaps geometry. The project of collaboration—like the project of marriage—starts with a conversation, an enjoining of two visions, and a cleaving, in both meanings of the word. They marry two sensibilities, then invite in the necessary uncertainty and unpredictability of creation. In the forge of conversation, an idea is born; in the crucible of the creative act, the idea is alchemized into a new—and sometimes unforeseen—entity. Louviere + Vanessa’s photographs strip away the parameters of time, removing the benefit of that way of contextualizing and defining what the viewer sees. Instead, the images emerge as archetypes or shards of myth: deeply personal tableaux that challenge the viewer to enter the conversation. For them, the more personal the image, the more universal are the potential responses to it. By distressing and abusing the final negatives, they re-impose time (through the process of disintegration and decay) onto the time-less picture; like myth, the final product is both ancient and breathtakingly new. The work of Louviere + Vanessa is unabashedly narrative and borrows from stories, dreams, and the collective human unconscious. Like authors, they dress and pose their characters then set them loose to fill their particular created universe. Their subjects converse with the camera and with their settings; like the traditional tableaux vivants, they are at once more universal and more individual in their stylized setting than they could be in the fog of the everyday.
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