Upcoming Solo Exhibition, 'Wild Weather,' by Lori Larusso at Galleri Urbane

Location: 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207

Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Wild Weather, a solo exhibition by Kentucky-based artist Lori Larusso. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, following Larusso's first museum solo exhibition, A Paradox of Plenty, at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (2025). Wild Weather consists of pieces recontextualized for a commercial gallery, a mini installation in conversation about what we look out for and what comes looking for us.

An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition:

In Wild Weather, Lori Larusso files a meteorological report. The conditions it records are a forecast for how we live, a reading of the climate inside the home.

The artist pursues two types of work: rectangular, single-subject paintings and cut- out panels. Wild Weather gathers the panels, shaped paintings whose crisp edges trace the outline of what they depict. These have recently figured in institutional shows. Larusso’s first museum solo exhibition, at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts last year, was a large-scale installation titled A Paradox of Plenty: piles of familiar, discarded objects, abundance sliding into decay. An installation titled Precarious Panoply at the Aronoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati preceded it. Now, Wild Weather is the first time the pieces are recontextualized for another space, a mini installation in conversation about what we look out for and what comes looking for us.

Each panel is a painting in its own right, with its own composition, symmetry, and dynamism. Together they behave like the creatures in Beatrix Potter for grown-ups, sharing one story, carrying another alone, wandering in and out of each other’s tales. The viewer is the final narrative-creator.

The scenes are domestic. A dog sporting a cat-ear headband curls upon a black-and- blue zebra-print armchair while two cats loll and stretch at the chair’s feet. A taxidermy deer head hangs above a spotted deer-hide rug splayed out on the floor. A refrigerator, papered with the detritus of take-out menus affixed with magnets and topped with a microwave, signals a fast-casual food culture: rapid in pace, thin in substance.

Through all of it runs a red telephone cord. It loops in places and pulls taut in others, a wire for ubiquitous, non-native starlings to perch on. It is the telephone cord from Larusso’s childhood home, a lifeline pulled around a corner to talk in privacy. We can ask ourselves whether we are tied together or strung out to dry.

Representations of animals make a second throughline in Larusso’s work, domestic and synanthropic alike. Possums, raccoons, and deer belong to the synanthropes, wild species that thrive in close proximity to humans. She considers them from various angles: the personalities we assign pets and the parts we mine from other creatures. She counts them all as trophies: a deer head on the wall, zebra print on a chair, the cat in a picture posted for strangers to admire. Meanwhile, in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, black bears, feral pigs and armadillos have begun to appear, in addition to the more traditional scavengers, drawn to our food and our trash. They are thriving, and the reasons lie in how we live and build.

Visual puns and ironies abound. And wry humor. “Things that are funny can also be very serious,” Larusso says. The messages slip across coded in whimsy, allowing us to take in difficult subjects more easily. The show is playful and complex in the same breath.

The scale is human, with pieces hung at different heights, like the elements of a stage set. Such placement invites us to consider them in relation to ourselves, measuring them against our own bodies. They are both images and mirrors, invitations to think while staying in

the room.

The title carries these layers. “Weather” speaks to climate change, and to weathering a storm, moving through something. “Wild” names the unprecedented and unpredictable. It registers displacement alongside a sense of being swept up in something human-made. No one is prepared for this weather, or any weather. Yet Larusso treats climate change as a day-to-day condition we live inside, painting it at the scale of a kitchen.