Lorette C. Luzajic
Lorette C. Luzajic is an assemblage artist who has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States. Her most recent exhibitions include venues such as Pegasus, Gerrard Art Space, and Propeller Art Gallery in Toronto, Neilson Park Creative Centre in Etobicoke, Canada, Dayton University in Ohio, Galerie Menil'8 in Paris, and Black Box Gallery in Curuna, Spain. Lorette’s work was the subject of a short film documentary titled Asking for a Friend and she has been published by Art Baazar, Dark Elements, Empty Easel,Street Light Magazine, and Treehouse Arts magazines. She is a member of The International Society of Assemblage and Collage Artists and Workman Arts based in Toronto.
These vibrant assemblage works by Lorette include both collage and paint of text clippings and imagery of pop culture icons such as Clark Gable, Madonna, Amy Winehouse, Mohammed Ali, Benedict Cumberbatch, Princess Diana of Wales, and Marylin Monroe. Incorporating various forms of paint, material, and print clippings, the assemblages communicate powerful text messages evoking nostalgic memories such as Clark Gable’s last famous line in part one of Gone With the Wind of "frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”.
While Lorette’s much larger abstract assemblages are quite notable, these small, intimate series of ‘signature squares’ reflecting the integration of pop icon photographic prints into the works convey a sense of direct cultural reflection. Economically priced and small in stature, the ‘signature squares’ should be further explored into much larger pieces in order to enhance the brilliant urban qualities in the works. Messy, improvised, scratchy, these works exemplify controlled chaos and reflect an orchestration of advanced design principles without rigidity or stiffness, expressing a deep sense of motion and exploration of color. Typically conveying neon tones and smears of paint, these assemblages embark the viewer on a journey through Lorette’s wild imagination revealing her personal consumption of postmodern cultural material.
Frequent depictions of the pop singer Madonna (pictured above) in particular pieces always seem to portray her in recent age rather than during her famed prime during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Such a depiction of Madonna with a trident and sealife could be best describing her as a fish out of water. Her unusual impact on pop culture with her racy lyrics and sensuality becomes exemplified in a sort of liberation through Lorette’s expressive and symbolic assemblages.
Lorette C. Luzajic pushes the boundaries of assemblage with her urban and eloquent sophisticated orchestration of smears, brush strokes, text, and imagery. Instead of a convoluted mess, Lorette’s refined sense of composition seems to bring together composure between imagery, text, and splatters of paint. She explores the connotations of the meaning of pop culture in a true aesthetic sense without shallowness or fluff. These heavily personalized works, although many in number, are quite unique from one another reflecting consistency without stale repetition. Lorette employs complexities in an age where communication and mass media can be described as loud, messy, chaotic, and full of debauchery, representing such concepts with worldly integration of the written word, photographic realism, and abstract expressive painting.
