Shattering urban landscapes
Painter, photographer pair up in new Flinn Gallery exhibit opening Thursday
GREENWICH — Valeri Larko often finds herself crawling under rusting fences and tromping through seas of overgrown weeds at work.
Which might come as a surprise, because she’s an artist.
But the 5-foot-2 painter is not drawn to still lifes and portraits. For her, nothing is more tantalizing than finding a derelict graffiti-covered factory building or a golf center that hasn’t seen a soul tee off in decades.
“I’m a little bit of an urban archaeologist,” said the New Rochelle, N.Y. resident. “I always like to work from life. I like being out there. Being out in the world, you see so much you would otherwise miss.”
Larko’s vivid canvases — along with photographer Linda Kuehne’s evocative images — can be found in “Spaces of Uncertainty,” a stunning new exhibition opening Thursday at Greenwich Library’s Flinn Gallery. The opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The works, most of which are for sale, will be display through April 30.
Pairing Larko and Kuehne for the exhibition was a simple decision, as the two are kindred spirits. While Larko chooses as her muse neglected meatpacking plants and shadow-strewn Bronx underpasses, Kuehne is fascinated by the transience of the built environment, focusing on the shuttered storefronts and ice cream stands that make up the deteriorating commercial sprawl of 1950s and 1960s suburbia.
“It’s the end of the American Dream of suburban expansion,” Isabelle Schiavi, the exhibition’s curator, said of the Pound Ridge, N.Y. photographer. “She calls it
‘the architecture of nowhere’ or ‘the dream deferred.’ ”
For the past 10 years, Kuehne has been capturing empty storefronts and fast food restaurants around the Northeast, as well as in Arizona and the West, where she spends long stretches of time. Some images are shot through windows into vacant shops, while others reveal striking abstract composition.
“She focuses on places that have lost their original function,” said Schiavi, a Greenwich resident.
Larko, too, manages to find both the melancholy and mystical in her vistas. She believes the magic comes from her insistence on painting en plain air, visiting her chosen site several times for weeks or months rather than taking a photo and heading back to the studio to complete the work.
As a result, Larko gets a deeper feeling for the presence of her subject — as well as the people who might call it home or mark it with graffiti and the flora and fauna springing up around something society has turned its back on. She often befriends those she meets, taking exacting pains to re-create a graffiti artist’s tag or taking in the dog of a then-homeless woman who couldn’t find an apartment that would accept pets.
The humans don’t show their faces on canvas, though.
“People don’t stay still long enough,” said Larko, who was the subject of a large solo show at the Bronx Museum in 2016. “They’re fleeting. I’m very interested in architecture and infrastructure and when Nature is reasserting herself.”
Larko paints five or six large paintings a “season,” the warmer months when she can be outside for extended periods. In chilly January, you might find her re-creating a billboard or traffic sign from the relative warmth of her car, which she calls “the paintmobile.”
“I might be dressed like an Eskimo, but I’m out there,” she said, laughing.
In fact, there’s no place she’d rather be. “The world is such a fascinating place,” she said. “I love to paint. I’m a happy painter. I am never bored when I’m painting. Never.”