“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.

       —Annie Wedekind, Editor–FSG books, NYC

Farr Too Near

20"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2003

Lessons for Dead Birds

20"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2004

Hover

24"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2004

Equilibrium

30"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2003

Scopophobe

20"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2004

Cobweb Sweeper

20"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2003

The English Bride

20"X30"

Archival inkjet on Hahnemule

2003