Laura Larson (b. 1965) presents an ensemble of related works: a 27-minute video projection Electric Girls and the Invisible World, a silent video loop Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather, three medium-format black and white photographs and a selection of color video stills.
The central video ... Read more
Laura Larson (b. 1965) presents an ensemble of related works: a 27-minute video projection Electric Girls and the Invisible World, a silent video loop Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather, three medium-format black and white photographs and a selection of color video stills.
The central video Electric Girls and the Invisible World blends documentary and fiction as it follows the five smart and lively teenage girlfriends—Annie, Emma, Joshelyn, Maria and Ryan—and their mysterious identification with Eusapia Palladino, the nineteenth-century spiritualist medium. Interspersed with their reading of historical passages about Palladino, the video presents the girls’ efforts to summon her, either directly with a Ouija Board or as an inspirational figure of power as they explore their own paranormal abilities. The viewer also watches as they express self-confidence and delight during other rituals of female adolescence like manicures and makeovers. The closing sequence of play and spontaneous magic in a swimming pool unites Larson’s narrative of wonder and her own playful challenge to the assumption of objectivity in photography.
Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather depicts the girls in a display of supernatural levitation in an empty cabin. Barely animated, their figures gently float up and down, each seemingly in a private trance but participating in an act of communion. Like a photograph, the non-linear temporal space of this work produces a sense of suspension of this fragile, transitional moment of femininity.
Larson’s work considers the medium of photography with both skepticism and desire, to illuminate its melancholic character. The three black and white photographs in the exhibition isolate scenes from a séance in which the participants evince such intense inner concentration that it appears as though the images themselves spring from their own capacity to imagine. A closer inspection reveals the staging of these supernatural feats—a deliberate statement of artifice in tension with the earnest nature of the girls’ performances. It is this tension that mobilizes Larson’s central question: how do magic and truth become indistinguishable in the photograph?
This is Laura Larson’s third solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg and the first to include the medium of digital video. Larson is Chair of the Photography Program at Ohio University in Athens and received support from the university for the research and production of Electric Girls and the Invisible World. The project also received support for post-production from the Wexner Center for the Arts Art and Tech Program.
