Artist Statement
Tradition and adventure — a description both personal and cultural, not ascribed to us, but by us. The South gave the world flight, rock-n-roll, the birth of a nation of filmmakers and an endless source of artistic raw materials.
Louviere + Vanessa combine the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They utilize Holgas, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, gold, resin, wax and blood. They have a long fascination with themes of duality and paradox: beauty as horror, creation as destruction, the personal as a universal. Craft, concept and history are the devices they use to explore the gray zone within those themes.
Louviere + Vanessa explore the idea that the medium of photography is more important than any one photo because the radical mechanics of photography has caused them to consider the making of images. They’ve taken the raw materials, changed variables and given them new possibilities within the realm of photography.
Louviere + Vanessa's 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 over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art 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 acquired by the George Eastman House for an exhibit that traveled 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. L+V were invited to exhibit for the Ballarat Photography Biennale. They had their first solo museum exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in October 2012, followed by a solo show at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, FL.
Jeff Louviere is from New Orleans, Vanessa is from New York and they met each other in Savannah, Goergia. 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 almost became a pro race car driver but instead, she photographed through 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. 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.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.
