For more than a decade, the British-Canadian artist Lorena Lohr has been travelling the American Southwest by bus and train, documenting the fleeting landscapes and the distinct character of the region’s built environment. Lohr’s work takes in a variety of artistic disciplines. As a photographer, she captures everything from motels and bars to parking lots and patches of waste ground, focusing on unexpected and often uncanny aspects of the commonplace and mundane in the places she visits without ironic detachment or comment.

Though she does not limit herself to any particular subject, her photographs are characterised by recurring motifs: electrical wiring, colourful drinks and details of the bodywork of automobiles are just some of the hallmarks that stretch across her series and artist’s books. Language, as glimpsed in commercial signage, is another leitmotif of her photographs: generic phrases that evoke an exoticism at odds with their surroundings feature heavily, both contributing the visual richness of her compositions and hinting at hope, longing and isolation. Shot on 35mm colour film with compact and

inexpensive cameras, Lohr’s images stay true to the DIY spirit that characterises much of what she chooses to photograph, underlining the beauty and individuality of overlooked or neglected spaces that would otherwise go unnoticed.

To these ends, she has created a number of limited edition artist’s books, the most recent of which is Crystal Sands (2022). The pictures in these publications do not expressly seek to romanticise or glamourise. Instead, they celebrate the idiosyncratic traces of human involvement on a given area and the incidental layers of narrative that build up over time in the places she visits. Aside from likenesses glimpsed in adverts or on signs or murals, Lohr’s photography almost entirely eschews representations of people. As a painter, however, she places the female form at the forefront of her compositions.

The oil-on-board works comprising her ‘Desert Nudes’ series (2014 – present) depict female figures in richly-detailed desert landscapes, and at first glance appears to draw on kitsch-adjacent imagery. Yet on closer inspection, it is clear that these meticulously-rendered compositions are equally informed by older art historical sources. Lohr has long been interested in the art of the Northern Renaissance, particularly paintings depicting Biblical scenes in the deserts of the Middle East. Most of these artists – the possible exception being Van Eyck – would never have seen a desert, and their fantastical renderings of the barren landscapes would have been primarily derived from written sources. And while many treasures from the Spanish New World were flooding through the port of Antwerp, their visions of America – as an idea, by no means absent from their imaginations – would have been altogether more alien. Lohr’s paintings thus transplant the iconic (in the religious sense) or mythological imagery to the American southwest.

The imagined female figures in these paintings are not, however, mythological beings; nor are the images themselves primarily referential works. A self-taught painter, Lohr takes an intuitive approach to the discipline, drawing on her own experiences of travel and observation but not questioning where an idea for any specific composition might come from until the image begins to take shape. The paintings develop over weeks, months and often even years. As physical objects, they therefore speak of countless hours of deliberation, and can be read as palimpsests: much like the arrangements, buildings and landscapes Lohr photographs, they contain layer upon layer of often hidden meaning and intent.

This is not the only link between Lohr’s work in her two primary artistic disciplines. Both her paintings and in her photographs can be read as testaments to the power of escapist fantasy and unfulfilled dreams. Whether glimpsed in a photograph of a faded 1970s Tiki bar interior, or through the artist’s instinctive paintings of nudes in extraordinary desert settings, the principle applies across her diverse spectrum of work.

UPCOMING EXHIBITION:

The Dallas Art Fair: April 10 - 13, 2025