Deborah Luster

Deborah Luster

Tooth for an Eye

December 4-29, 2013

For her series Tooth for an Eye, Deborah Luster has created an extensive visual archive of contemporary and historic homicide sites in New Orleans, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the United States. Each gelatin silver print depicts a scene of past violence, now noticeably devoid of any human presence. The tondo photographs created by Luster's 8x10 view camera are at once nostalgic and unsettling, as the circular shape references her antique tool while also mimicking what one might see looking through the scope of a gun. Ledgers that accompany the images provide handwritten details about the locations, the people, and the weapons (many of which are guns) involved in these murders. Yet despite the fraught history this project unearths, Luster's framing of each scene also evokes the beauty and resilience of an iconic city, where life and death coexist as a matter of course.

Originally from Bend, Oregon, Deborah Luster currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has exhibited solo shows at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New Orleans Museum of Art, and other notable public and private collections. She has published two monographs: Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (Twin Palms Publishing, 2011) and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Twin Palms Publishing, 2003). This is Luster's second solo show at Blue Sky.