Splendor in the living room

The creative process can be a healing one. Mixed-media artist Lynda Frese’s collection at False Front Studio, Tara in the Living Room, provides a perfect example of art as therapy. As a Louisiana-based artist, Frese has confronted the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in an honest and constructive fashion.

Daily Vanguard: What can we expect from your latest exhibit?

Lynda Frese: The exhibition is a collection of artworks from different bodies of work that span about 10 years. One group is collage, gelatin-silver photographs on canvas with paint. They were made while I was working at an artist’s colony in Italy in 2000.

My subject matter was the Madonna and the Female Divine, about the connection of the Madonna with the early goddess figures. Where were her origins in time? How were the early goddess figures connected in history to the concept of the Madonna in Christianity? I have always been interested in pre-historic art and the early pre-Christian pagan stories.

Then there is the larger concept of the mother goddess that exists in all religions. So, it was a project about the divine feminine. 

Some years later, I began to explore the gods and goddesses from India. This series, called Hindu Deities Along the Gulf Coast, was put together after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated Louisiana in 2005. In these digital works—the collage work is made entirely with the computer—Indian deities like Lord Ganesh and the goddess Tara appear inside the ruined spaces from the houses I photographed along the coast in Mississippi and Louisiana after the hurricanes. The title of the show at False Front is named Tara in the Living Room after one of the pieces. Tara is the Eastern goddess of compassion. In the picture, she hovers near a pile of household debris collected after the storms in what was once someone’s living room.

DV: What is your creative process like?

LF: My latest work is a combination of photography and painting. I’m using egg tempera on top of digital photographs. In this body of work, I examine the parallels between the Italian Renaissance and the Mayan 2012 prophecies. This work is not in the show, but you can see how I am again bringing two cultures together, in this case to understand notions of the apocalypse and rebirth. 

DV: As a Louisiana-based artist, how would you say Hurricane Katrina has impacted your work?

LF: Hindu Deities Along the Gulf Coast was an immediate response to the intense grief and distress around the catastrophe. At this time, I visited India, as I was also beginning to practice yoga. As I remember, I also desperately wanted a break from the misery of Louisiana immediately after the storms. Fascinated by the vast Hindu pantheon and religion stories, I photographed many of the altars and figurines that were found everywhere.

Back home, I photographed along the coast in small towns, as well as around New Orleans. Then I started to merge the two worlds. One was a pure documentation of the disaster and the other was a spiritual dreaminess. Funnily enough, the disaster really ended up kick-starting photography in Louisiana in a very positive way. Artists and musicians came together in amazing ways.

 One of the crucial ways we have all healed is through the arts. Hurricane Katrina (and Rita, which came two weeks later to southwest Louisiana) was a relentless subject in my work and the work of many, many artists. The big issues of life and death around the storms became the only subject for a while. Even now the galleries are filled with hurricane art. Sometimes it is dealt with in a trite manner, and sometimes it is profoundly moving and transcendent.