Tutti Frutti
 

Collection of 22 blown glass fruits, sizes vary

Single channel looping video, 20:00 

Monoprints 1 - 4

Installation Views: 
Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX
Kitteredge Gallery, Tacoma, WA
 

Banana in progress:

Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA 

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Tutti Frutti, the first solo exhibition at Galleri Urbane by Liss LaFleur, is an immersive multi-media installation anchored by blown glass objects, a new collection of monoprints, and a new film. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” and the “fruit machine,” a military device used by the U.S. and Canadian government during the Cold War to detect and purge LGBT individuals, this exhibition examines the semiotics of fruit in relation to the queer body. 

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The core of the exhibition is comprised of 22 blown glass fruits. Created during an artist residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, these exaggerated glass fruits are scaled proportionally to bodily measurements of the artist and her mother. A glass banana the length of LaFleur’s leg, apples the size of her fists, and an impressive grape stem in the proportion of the her spine (complete with head-sized grapes) were borne through research on the historical use of fruit to feminize, criminalize, and sexualize the body. Equally significant to the exhibition is a new single channel video, Boi with A Fruit Basket  (2018). The rose-colored gel in each hollow glass object beckons to special window treatments that filter the room’s light in the same hue and alter the viewer’s experience of the space. 

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