Louviere + Vanessa

Bio

Louviere + Vanessa make their home and art in New Orleans. Their 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 created the first movie shot with a plastic Holga camera consisting of 1,900 frames. Based on that film, they shot the animation sequence for Rosanne Cash’s short film, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. They were included in the Australian Photography Biennale. Their first museum exhibition was for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art opening in October 2012 followed by a solo show at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland Florida. They collaborated with author Michael Zell in 2013 for the book “Oblivion Atlas”. Their work served as influence and inspiration for short stories by Michael Allen Zell, and L + V in turn have created new work to serve as backdrop and counterpoint to the stories. The recent book from Candela, “Black Forest” features some of their work in context to modern surrealism and was designed and illustrated by Jeff Louviere. They are now exhibiting photographs of sound and created a 12” vinyl record with music, images and animation.

Jeff Louviere is from New Orleans, Vanessa is from New York and they met each other half-way, in Savannah. 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 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.

Image credit: Louviere + Vanessa, Photograph in D, 2016, Mixed media – archival pigment print on kozo paper, gold leaf and resin, 48 x 48 inches