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Arts & Entertainment

A Portrait of the Artist: Laura Elkins

Laura Elkins brings First Ladies to the Arts Barn in Gaithersburg, from now until the end of July.

"The only reason paintings in my First Ladies series called the White House Collection are easel paintings, is that they refer to easel paintings," said multimedia artist Laura Elkins who enjoys and excels at stirring the pot through her provocative work.

As soon as she moved to Washington, D.C., in 2000, Elkins went on a tour of the White House. Seeing the official portraits of historic and contemporary first ladies inspired her to personalize them and reconsider an age-old tradition in painting. She embarked upon a series of self-portraits as the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson.

"I saw the White House portraits as an interesting device for exploring the self-portrait genre," said Elkins.

Her own portraits elude easy categorization but appeal to a Pop Art turned eerie aesthetic a la Lucian Freud or Philip Guston. The transposition of her own features onto the familiar faces of the women who have led our country and been immortalized in the news media over the years breeds a sense of discomfort at the proximity of the suggestion: the first ladies have stepped out of their traditional context as venerable figures of state and breached a humorously grotesque pseudo-political lens that renders them naked in many cases literally. Elkins's reinterpretations of the classical and iconic White House portraits grapple with femininity, sexuality, power and time simultaneously.

Coincident with the 2008 presidential election, a grant to develop new work at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts gave Elkins the impetus to imagine herself as Hilary Clinton. In stark contrast to the former first lady's busy election schedule, Elkins painted her on vacation. Inspired by the peaceful and quiet setting of the center, she reconceptualized the work in the plein air tradition. Many of these self-portraits are painted outdoors.

"Painting outdoors at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts was largely a private affair. It wasn't until I started painting in popular outdoor locations, such as Point Overlook in the Shenandoah Mountains that people starting coming up to me and wondering what I was doing," said Elkins, who certainly politicized her process when she started setting up mirrors in conspicuous public places.

"One day there would be a beautiful scenic landscape on the canvas and the next I would turn my back to the view and start looking in the mirror to paint myself into the picture," said Elkins.

She also did several paintings of herself as Michelle Obama. The Tea Party series features various first ladies drinking tea.

"This was before the Tea Party really got going. The paintings are not about that but about first ladies drinking tea."

Elkins captures intimate, even vulnerable moments in the lives of these imaginary women who bear an uncanny likeness to our symbols of powerful yet gracious political and human figures.

Her work took an overtly political turn with the HOMEwRAP series a group of large-scale paintings on Tyvek, the building material.

Having lived in Lousiana for six years before she relocated to Washington, D.C., Elkins painted "Cajun Christmas" to "bring the tragedy home," at a time when the federal government was doing very little to mitigate the situation down South, she said. Wrapping the exterior of her home on Capitol Hill in Tyvek and covering the sturdy weatherproofing material in flood imagery, she did not allow government neglect of the Katrina crisis to go unnoticed in the public eye. In winter of 2006, during Mardi Gras celebrations, she sold the painting by the square foot at the Warehouse Theater in Washington, D.C., to benefit artists in Louisiana, she said.

"Having spent so much time there, I have a special empathy for artists in Louisiana," said Elkins. She devised "Why There Are No Great Women Artists: The Children's Room" as her most thorough integration of art and architecture, applying HOMEwRAP to both the interior and the exterior of a house in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

Elkins has applied the HOMEwRAP strategy to other sites beyond her home, including an installation at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, as well as at a public park in Baltimore during Art on the Trail. She also developed a series of paintings on Tyvek that reflect on government abuse, surveillance and infringements on civil rights following an unwarranted police raid on her home.

"I call them the inspector paintings. I am taking the idea further. Currently I have a proposal in for one of these paintings to fly over the Capitol as a giant blimp during the 2013 Inauguration."

Her blimp proposal, called 1% to refer to wealth inequity in the U.S., is on view at 1123 11th St NW in Washington as part of a show called 9, a collaboration between GreenHouse 11 and Harmon Art Lab.

Recently, Elkins had a solo show at The Fridge in Capitol Hill, featuring "Ode to Joy." She also showed pieces from the White House Collection there in a show called White House Negligee.

In April 2011, she had a solo show called DCwRAP at Ground Floor Workshop in Brooklyn, NY.

Elkins has a degree in architecture from the University of Virginia, where she studied figure drawing and painting with Robert Barbee. She grew up in Oxford, MS, and is largely a self-taught painter.

"I am interested in developing art and architecture together," she said. "The artists that I find inspiring and set me on my path are not the usual suspects."

Having spent some time in Italy during her college years, Elkins saw Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padova.

"He designed the chapel and made the paintings inside. I wanted to do this in some contemporary way."

Drawn to figurative painting and the dramatic and catastrophic, Elkins most admires the 18th century Venetian fresco painter Tiepolo.

She also makes frequent trips to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

"For my HOMEwRAP series, I was most inspired by 'Daniel in the Lion's Den' by Sir Peter Paul Rubens." This a a dramatically large and monumental painting.

"El Greco's 'Laocoön' was also an influence. It depicts the story of someone who was smited because he told the truth."

To find out more about Elkins, click here

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