Laura Larson's 'Complimentary' Exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg Features Hotel Room Photographs

Laura Larson's exhibition 'Complimentary' at Lennon, Weinberg in New York from May 17 to June 22, 2002, presents photographs of hotel rooms in disarray, capturing the convergence of corporate artifice and fugitive intimacy. The images initially appear generic, with scenes of cleaning services and rumpled beds, but reveal formal tensions and peripheral oddities upon closer inspection. Larson's work includes perspectives that shift from dead-on to overhead, coexisting queasily, and light from varied sources like screens, bulbs, and windows. Colors in the rooms seem disconnected from their light sources, with muted whites and beiges or intense reds that evoke artificiality. The photographs tease with blank eloquence, reminiscent of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's street scenes, focusing on surface details rather than emotional subterranean clues. Additionally, behind the gallery desk, Larson displays smaller photographs of museum period rooms and crime scene miniatures, adding a Hitchcockian dream-like strangeness absent in the hotel scenes. The placement of these smaller images creates an intriguing parallel to the visual experience within the larger hotel photographs, leaving viewers curious and dispirited.