Laura Larson
Laura Larson
Hidden Mother
August 6–31, 2014
For the exhibition Hidden Mother, artist Laura Larson has curated an extensive collection of nineteenth-century tintypes featuring portraits of children. In each image on display, the mother or caretaker is present, but strategically—if not entirely successfully—concealed from view. Early photographic technology required long exposures for capturing images, which necessitated creative techniques for keeping small children from moving and blurring their portraits. A mother would often remain in the frame as a calming influence, holding her child with a cloth draped over her face or hiding behind props. Sometimes she would stand outside of the image, allowing a single arm to break through the frame to reassure her child. Attempts to remove mothers from view would also take place in post-production, with the use of oval frames or mats centered on the child and blocking the mother. In some instances, the mother’s face could be violently scratched away or painted over on the tintype’s surface. However, Larson has consciously presented these small hidden mother images in their original, uncropped forms, challenging this erasure of the maternal presence from each frame. She poignantly asks the long-gone photographers, “Why not photograph the mother and child together?”
Laura Larson is a photographer based in Athens, Ohio, where she teaches photography in the School of Art at Ohio University. She earned a BA in English from Oberlin College and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Larson has exhibited her work in national and international museums and galleries, including Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, Susanne Vielmetter/L.A. Projects, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Reviews of her exhibitions have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York, and she has published artist projects in Cabinet, Documents, Open City, and The Literary Review. She has received grants from Art Matters, Inc. and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Larson’s work is represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York City, where her retrospective, Laura Larson: Photographs 1996-2012, is currently on view through September 13, 2014.