©Emily Larsen,“Roost” from the series Beastly

This week we are featuring Still Life projects, and on Friday we finish with a 4-part Exhibition on Still Lifes!

Emily Larsen’s photographs are filled with the type of chaotic exuberance one might not immediately associate with the still life genre.  Patterned backdrops collide with flowers, fruit, found objects, and the detritus of contemporary life in compositions that revel in color, texture, and visual play. Larsen embraces the photograph as a constructed object. The artist’s hand is ever-present: cut paper fruit mingles with real produce, and fabricated elements coexist with natural forms.  Elaborate patterned surfaces flatten and complicate pictorial space. The result is a joyful tension between reality and artifice, where the familiar becomes theatrical and the ordinary is transformed into something delightfully strange.

©Emily Larsen, “Ancestors” from the series Beastly

My work is heavily influenced by our collective disconnection with nature and non-digital reality, womanhood, and the general absurdity of life. my enduring interest lies in the space between the human experience and shared reality. The intangible fuzzy cloud that allows us to continue forward as we rotate between functional ignorance and the horrors of realization. I reject the banality and sterility of perfection and strive to create images and objects that celebrate the variations and possibilities that reflect our experience. Much of my practice is cathartic, guttural, and reactionary. – Emily Larsen

Emily Larsen earned her B.F.A. in Photography at the School of Visual Arts, NYC. Before fully turning her attention to art she got her B.A. in  English, Psychology, and Philosophy at Flagler College.

©Emily Larsen, “Blue” from the series Memento Mori

 Can you speak to the heavy presence of Still life in your work, even when it isn’t technically still life.

 It is something I think about often with my work. One of my first finished projects was a self portrait series (Reluctant Response) that, in the end, I realized was some amalgamation of portraiture and still life. The original Still Life paintings started with a deep interest in objects and their symbolism. It evolved to include spiritual symbolism, very accurate details of nature and eventually as a reflection of wealth and commerce. They were humble brags of their accomplishments and value systems. And overall we’ve been following in those same footsteps, but we’ve lost the general shared language of what certain flowers mean and the symbolism of objects we now take for granted. Its a tool for exploring shape, color and design, but often without any of the heavy and philosophical weight they originally had.

What do we value and hold symbolic today? What do we value enough to imortalize in a piece of art? That’s the question I asked myself early on in my practice and am still working to answer. I find little still lives all the time in the everyday. Little moments of happen chance that reflect something of the people around it. I found the idea of still life as a reflection of personal value and wealth more apropos to the modern era. I make images to reflect what I value and hold dear. Creating my own symbolism and still life language to explore the complicated and laden relationship between the personal and public in our lives.

I’m very attracted to the layers of things, deconstruction and how you can make those layers interact to create new stories. Still life immediately gave me an accessible medium to manipulate each layer to tell a story and convey a feeling. Each image develops over time and I do not strive for perfection. I actively reject perfection because I just don’t think it’s very interesting. I purposefully leave in the tape and string and staples I use to create the set up, because that’s part of it. The made-ness of it. The intention upfront and center. On the rare occasion I add a digital layer it’s obvious and planned and part of the conversation.

©Emily Larsen, “Dodo” from the series Beastly

Your still life images contain classical elements like flowers and fruit, but they are combined with pattern, color, and the detritus of contemporary life.  Can you talk about the process of making these images and how you came to it? (Memento Mori, Beastly, etc)

Our visual world is a boring, repetitive, algorithmic soup of ad-inspired banality  that devaules the obscure or new or interesting in order to homogenize our experience. We now have AI images adding to that flavorless soup with authorless nothings. If my art is anything, it’s impulsive. Cathartic and intuitive depictions resulting from long ruminations about everything from modernity to feminism to mortality. Different projects hone in on different things. They all apease my need for stimulation and cerebral excitement. Patterns and color and odd juxtopositions tickle something deep that jostles me. The way colors interact is soothing and adding playful patterns to the mix is like therapy for me. 

In Beastly I took phone pictures of the taxidermy dioramas in museums and printed them as backdrops, often with the glass reflections still visible. Still lifes were built infront of the scenes in a way meant to interact with the background while also ignoring it. Like when you are leaning against the display case glass at a museum while checking your phone, with no clue there is a pack of hyenas right behind you. Throughout the project I was thinking about our relationship to the animal kingdom, Motherhood, and modernity. How we cling to our superiority to animals, but the things we exalt in ourselves are relativly trivial when compared to those we share. And we’ve lost ourselves because of it. It felt right when also considering our increasingly curated digital lives and the disconnect to our real ones. Each image is layered with questions of what’s real and what’s fake. What are we valuing and what are we willing to dismiss?

Memento Mori (latin: remember that you must die) evolved from beastly and focused more on our fetishism of nature and our inabilty to care for it. Each image blurring the lines between real and fabrication set against an absurd pop of color.. Between alive and dead. Between reality and fantasy.

Impatienly Waiting and Impatienty Coping uses similar visual language to explore the journey of motherhood, identity loss and identity reconstruction. Both projects utilized color more dramatically and relied heavily on light painting as a metaphor for passing of time and the experience and unpredictability of change.

©Emily Larsen, “Editing” from the series Consumption

©Emily Larsen, “Autumn Scarcity” from the series Memento Mori

Can you talk about the process of making these images and how you came to it?

I can usually find what I need in my little collections of curious items stashed around and make what I don’t have. I have a myriad of creative interests so often I make something for one reason and it finds its way into an image. If I don’t have a vase I like, I just make one out of paper or food or tin foil. Every roadblock is an opportunity to make a new creative choice. I design the fabrics that I use and that’s probably the only thing I prepare with intention in advance (I use them in sewing projects later). And gardening. I try to grow most of the flowers and plants I use. I approach each image idea as a creative adventure, froliking around my house, yard and neighborhood finding things that feel like they belong. Sometimes I fail terribly, but that’s half of the point of creating anything. The process of making images is instinctual and vaguely withholding. I learn more about what I’m trying to say along the way, my thoughts and ideas solidifying as the images come together. Each image a little facet of an incomprehensibly bigger picture that is slowly revealing itself.

©Emily Larsen, “Green Bird” from the series Memento Mori

©Emily Larsen, “Listing” from the series Color Studies

©Emily Larsen, “Loss and Life” from the series Beastly

©Emily Larsen, Pears” from the series Memento Mori

©Emily Larsen, “Predator” from the series Beastly

©Emily Larsen, “Sanitized Air” from the series Memento Mori

©Emily Larsen, “Tigress” from the series Beastly

©Emily Larsen, “Water” from the series Color Studies

©Emily Larsen, “Yellow Aviary” from the series Memento Mori