Artist of the Month October 2011

Laura Elkins

Washington DC

Soon after moving to Washington in 2000, Laura Elkins began The White House Collection, her ongoing series of self-portraits as First Ladies. By embracing First Lady imagery, Elkins creates self-portraits that are deeply personal, while inherently historical and political. The work can address social and cultural issues, while maintaining the personal, everywoman quality of the self-portrait, including questioning our notions of femininity, sexuality, and aging. The featured work are selections from Summer in the City, the latest paintings in The White House Collection. In the District, recent exhibitions of the self-portraits include White House Negligee, a solo show at the Fridge in January, 2011; unbearable, presented by Thomas Drymon Selects in September, 2010; and King Me, curated by Adam Dwight, which will be in 2012. Self as Mamie Undressing is included in Eccentric Portraits at Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, NY through October 16, 2011. In April 2011, Ground Floor Workshop in Brooklyn, NY hosted a solo show of an installation from the artist's concurrent series, HOMEwRAP. The Fridge and Harmon Art Lab in the District have also exhibited selections from HOMEwRAP. Other venues include Wrestling Angels at iscp in Brooklyn, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD, and the 7th Krasnoyrsk Museum Siberian Biennale, curated by Yulia Tikhonova. Recent press includes Contemporary Art Truck, Flavorpill , and Go.See.Now in New York, and in DC, The Washington Post, TBD, as well as interviews by Thomas Drymon, Q&A with a First Lady, and Bora Mici, A Portrait of the Artist: Laura Elkins. Laura Elkins has a degree in architecture from the University of Virginia, where she studied figure drawing and painting. In 2008, she was the Forsyth Fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

How and when did you start creating art?

Like most artists, I started as a kid: it stuck. I vaguely remember making a decision in high school to "be" an artist, although I took a circuitous route by way of architecture school. I never got around to art school and for the most part, I am self-taught as a painter.

What media and genres do you work in?

That depends on the specific project. In fact, a major aspect of my work is the relationship between the support and content. For example, the paintings in The White House Collection are easel paintings only because they reference easel paintings (the official First Lady portraits). For years, I had an aversion to stretched canvas -- too pat -- and developed shaped pieces. The installations integrate multiple disciplines. Why There Are No Great Women Artists: The Children's Room integrated painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape. I've included audio in recent installations and am toying with video as well. I have recently started doing some hand-made prints, and I often use photography in my iPhonegraphs, digital prints I produce by drawing on the screen of my iPhone.

Who or what are your influences?

All sorts of people along the way, including artists, architects, and writers -- growing up in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner had a major impact. I continue to find inspiration from Tiepolo -- his prowess as a painter as well as the spatial integration of the work -- I always stop in to visit his paintings when I'm at the Metropolitan in New York. Seeing Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel had a profound effect on the development of my art-and-architecture projects. Now, it's more painting by painting. For instance, in The Dressing Table Paintings, recent large scale First Lady paintings, you will find influences and references to artists as diverse as Perugino, Bernini, and Cezanne.

Self as Eleanor in Cap and Goggles, along with the other paintings in Summer in the City, juxtaposes leisure activity and guns -- single-minded in that respect. Similarly, I often use weapons in The Dressing Table Paintings, to grapple with violence, or the potential, in our ordinary, day-to-day lives.

Describe your creative process?

I paint the self-portraits from life -- I refer to photos of the First Ladies primarily for their hairdos -- so the paintings have a perfomative aspect. In Self as Eleanor in Cap and Goggles, I wore tinted goggles while I painted, which influenced the palette of the painting. In Self as Jackie with Mask and Snorkel, the mask fogged, which resulted in a painting that's "out-of-focus." Creating The Dressing Table Paintings made physical demands such as perching nude on a ladder for Papal Audience, or taking up smoking for The Card Players. I also like creating, what often remains, an imaginary architectural context to the paintings. This architecture was, in fact, realized in The Children's Room -- a translation of a group of paintings into architecture. However, the recent installation at Ground Floor Workshop, for instance, was a painting that responded to the specific architecture of the gallery while developing a proposal for an art-and-architecture project -- a sort of painting of a painting. This approach creates an equipoise between the representational and the abstract, the imaginary and the real that animates me. Although, quite frankly, I would love to realize more art-and-architecture projects.

What are you working on currently?

I am working on a proposal for Inspector America, a giant inflatable to fly above the US Capitol during the 2013 Inauguration: the latest development in the HOMEwRAP series. It's about civil liberties -- remember those? Inspector America will help you remember! No doubt, there will be more Summer in the City paintings. The next step in The Dressing Table Paintings is to investigate the concept of the toilette -- you will definitely see more art historical influences and references in those.

What are your near/long term goals as an artist?

More ops! So glad to have this one -- thank you. Continue painting, of course, which is the foundation of my practice, and, as I said, I would like commissions for more art-and-architecture projects. Inspector America is generating a lot of ideas, leading me in new directions with collaborative possibilities. Overall, my goal is to continue to develop and expand my work and my audience.

Where can people view/purchase your work (gallery, website, etc)?

Most of my work is on my Facebook website: http://www.facebook.com/LauraElkinsArt . I will also have more info about Inspector America on Facebook, if people would like to be involved in that project: fundraising is major! And take a look at the Private Home+Public Art Project that promotes artists who install public art on private property. For The Dressing Table Paintings, contact Alex Goldstein at the Fridge. MacGregor Harp and Brandy Carstens at Ground Floor Workshop can help you with the latest work in HOMEwRAP. Or send me an email laura@lauraelkinsartist.com, or contact me through Twitter or Facebook.