By Lori Larusso
Editor’s Note: Last week, KMAC’s own Hunter Kissel provided his take on Larusso’s Triennial work. This week, we offer the artist’s own perspective on the work and its referents, along with a number of photos by the artist documenting the work’s creation.
A Pastiche of Good Intentions
Acrylic on poly metal panels
22 x 11.5 feet
2019
This painting installation explores flawed relationships between food, animals, and humans, from a specific perspective positioned squarely in late capitalist America.
Investigating the ways culture is shaped through our beliefs and actions, the painted panels are carefully crafted by hand and allude to the skill and physical labor involved in domestic chores such as food preparation, and the emotional (or invisible) labor of caregiving.
Referencing 17th century Dutch still life painting and Situationist Theory of the Spectacle, the flatness of image speaks to the accessibility of image and idea and the unattainable quality of object or status. These images simultaneously confirm and falsify existing belief systems that determine relationships with other living things (humans, animals, plants). I complicate the symbols, pointing to the malleability of meaning and the ways association is constructed and shifts over time.
The title text, A Pastiche of Good Intentions was appropriated from the body of an unmemorable news story. This installation points to the space between ambition and action, contains suggestions of both high and low class, speaking to desire and the increasingly complex spectrum of famine to feast.