Lorena Lohr | Texas Blue | Catalogue

Cob Gallery is pleased to present Texas Blue, a series documenting Lorena Lohr’s encounter with the Texas-Mexican border town of El Paso over the course of a month in Autumn 2017. These photographs form part of a larger body of works and ongoing series called Ocean Sands, part of which was shown at the artist’s first solo show at the gallery, curated by Jessica Draper.

Lohr’s journeys through nameless streets and forgotten highways form the basis of her numerous still life photographic series. Travelling alone around the American Southwest by train, Greyhound bus and on foot periodically since 2010, her pictures are, for the most part, devoid of people. Instead, an alternative portrait of the individuals who populate these spaces is built up through the traces that they leave behind in fleeting landscapes, bars, motels and suburban houses.

This distinct body of work, in it’s depiction of El Paso’s unique and vulnerable cityscape, captures an overlap of Mexican and American culture in a time of political and social uncertainty, and serves as a wider study of the Southwest and its border towns. Her investigation exposes a town in flux, caught in a crossfire, as the gradual encroachment of homogenised American corporations creeps in.

In this most recent series, hand-painted signage and buildings with ornate cornices and mouldings abruptly interject dusty pastel cityscapes, recalling the passing of a golden era. Recurring motifs in her study of the layered histories of local towns suggest the allure of the exotic and the sadness of unfulfilled dreams. Feelings of desire, aspiration and loneliness emerge, as fantasy and reality intermingle in her framing of surface and texture.

Lorena Lohr (b. 1990 London). After living in New York for five years from 2010, she now is based loosely between the two, travelling within North America and parts of Europe. She has maintained a self-taught practice for ten years. Her work has appeared in Wallpaper*, Another Man, i-D and Hot and Cool, amongst other publications. Past solo exhibitions have included Ocean Sands at the Liverpool International Photography Festival (2015), the Cob Gallery, London (2015) Photo Show at the Rochelle School, London (2013), as well as a showcase of her work at Claire de Rouen Books in London (2016). She also provided images for the film projection for Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ travelling multimedia show, Room 29 (2016-17).