Linda Lindroth. Trickster in Flatland

About

The show will feature spatially transformative photographic work examining vivid ephemera produced during the height of domestic manufacturing in the United States. Although not dominant, the work intentionally possesses subtle environmental and political undertones. As the artist states: “… they hang as testimonies to a subservient industry, one now diminished as production moves to global markets only to return to us shrink-wrapped and encapsulated in plastic.”

Linda Lindroth began using found objects in her work in 1982.  In Trickster in Flatland, simple cardboard containers are stripped of their original identity, enlarged to a vertigo-inducing scale, and portrayed shamelessly in various states of decay and disintegration.  Saturated, jewel-tone colors, enigmatic history, and art-historical allusions are created by flattening three-dimensional items and observing them closely, as if specimens under magnification.

By removing their interior spaces, folding their sides and pristinely isolating these packages on white rag paper, these once small, everyday objects become large abstracted visual icons, often with tongue-in-cheek cultural and art-historical titles.  Ironically, although now flattened to two-dimensions, the work reveals such palpable texture that they appear as trompe l’oeil collages, and dare the viewer to consider a new three-dimensional iteration.  That is Lindroth’s Trickster at work.  The title of the exhibition, Trickster in Flatland, is also inspired by the satirical novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott (1884) about a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures.