Terrarium Exhibition in-person performance art event by Susan Luss and Theo Trotter.
Susan Luss’s Things I Leave Behind and Theo Trotter’s Exuvia deal with the pain and beauty of change. Both artists create works that exist as vulnerable bodies in flux. Luss’s canvas and Trotter’s lace installations represent what remains after a difficult period of growth, a process that can both heal and threaten the body. Luss’s work was created in preparation to leave the studio for a major surgery, while Trotter’s references his experience with medical transition.
Convective Currents are defined as “a process that involves the movement of energy from one place to another." Intervening simultaneously in each other's installations, Luss and Trotter represent the cycles of growth and transformation, and the precarious emergence of new forms. Involving their own bodies in the process, the human body as well as the permeable skins and bodies of the works themselves enter a new cycle of life.
Video & Photography by Isaac Rivera.
Susan Luss, (b. 1959, El Paso, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York City, maintaining a studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Luss received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2016), New York, and her BFA in Studio Arts Painting from Pratt Institute (2013), Brooklyn. Luss has exhibited her work at various venues in the New York area, including Museum of Art and Culture, New Rochelle, NY, Lowe Mill A&E in Huntsville, AL, Chashama in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, The Knockdown Center, and Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn, The Hole in NYC, Haverstraw RiverArts in Haverstraw, NY, Garner Arts Center in Garner, NY, Westbeth Gallery and The Painting Center in NYC, among others. Luss has curated exhibitions at Pratt Institute, Westbeth Gallery, and Aaron Davis Hall, City College of New York. Luss’s work is held in public and private collections including Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and LaTable des Artists, Paris.
Theo Trotter is an artist working in a variety of media including latex and fibers. His work references the trans body as a palimpsest, through the marks of transformation and trauma that manifest on it. It deals with the idea of transformation as a necessary and transcendent, but simultaneously painful experience by utilizing the tension between beautiful and disgusting visual elements. This conflict between attraction and repulsion also represents injury and healing. He addresses visceral bodily experiences at the point where language begins to fail, dealing with, among other things, physical harm to the body, and the injury of forced femininity.
