Laurie Langford

I create shadowboxes, photographs, assemblage, installations, video, photo-transfer prints, and collage. Through dark humour, I create dialogue about the private and public aspects of women’s lives. As critic Phil Vanderwall wrote for my 2011 exhibition, The Exhibitchin’, I create “dioramas of pop culture innocence gone horribly wrong”. My artwork seems frozen in the pretty perfection and nostalgia of the 1920s to 1960s, but the juxtapositions that I create illustrate the continued harnessing of women through societal expectations, stereotypes, and religion.

I am inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell, Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Diana Thorneycroft, Hannah Höch, Elizabeth McGrath, Jorden and David Doody, Norm Barney, Joe Columbo, Douglas Coupland, Picasso, and poets Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings .

As René Magritte said of juxtaposition, “It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery. ”