Counterfeit

New Orleans-based creative duo Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, aka Louviere + Vanessa, combine photography, film, painting and printmaking to achieve highly original, thought-provoking works that push the boundary of each medium. For them the “medium of photography is more important than any one photo,” especially evident in the series Counterfeit, which aptly explores the tension between photography and painting, realism and abstraction.

The amplified photographs of world currency imagery, with the experimental addition of gold leaf, paint and resin, become highly sensual visual experiences. Large-scale in size at 38.5 x 55 inches, and ensconced in dramatic hand-built frames, the works in Counterfeit marry concept with craft, beauty with murkiness, and the visual with the textual.

Named in Oxford American’s 2012 “Superstars of Southern Art,” Louviere + Vanessa have had recent solo exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Polk Museum of Art. Their work is collected in public and private collections including George Eastman House; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Washington and Lee University; Ford Foundation; and the Pitt-Jolie collection.