Louisville-based painter Lori Larusso is fascinated by detritus and what it says about us. “I’m on foot a lot, so I’m always looking at the stuff that you find in urban areas,” from garbage to lost toys, she says. While on walks with her friends, she’ll frequently stop to take photos with her iPhone of discarded items on the street or by dumpsters in back alleys. “People send me photos now, too,” she says, “my friends know that I’m just always photographing trash.” These snapshots are the source material for Larusso’s paintings, which juxtapose our consumption-based culture with animals in the natural world. Her works are now part of a larger installation-based solo exhibition, A Paradox of Plenty, on view through May 2026 at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock.
Midden, 2024, acrylic paint on cut-out acrylic panels, latex paint on wall, and vinyl on floor, 107 1⁄2 x 368 3⁄4 x 110 3⁄4 inches.
Larusso begins each piece with a digital drawing—inspired by one of her reference photos—in Adobe Illustrator. She then sends the image to a shop that laser-cuts the design onto a cast acrylic panel. Once she’s received the panel back, she fills in the composition using acrylic paint. For the exhibition, she worked with a curator and a preparator at the museum to install each painting with a corresponding design on the wall behind it. One particularly striking painting, for example, titled Midden, depicts a dead deer with trash spilling out of its open stomach—a tissue box, half-eaten pizza, a keyboard. At the museum, Midden is hung on a wall with an asphalt road painted behind it, a vinyl cutout of a traffic cone spreading onto the floor across the hall. Larusso isn’t trying to grandstand about environmentalism, she says—she’s merely pointing out the absurdity of our overconsumption, with some dark humor mixed in. “The piles of stuff reference still life painting, but instead of being more about immortalized luxury or abundance, it’s the everyday stuff,” she says. “I’m not really painting the fancy stuff.”
