Mernet Larsen

"Mall Event" (2010), is reproduced from Damiani's excellent new monograph on painter Mernet Larsen. In his catalog essay, poet and critic John Yau writes, "We feel as if we should be looking at something we know, something familiar, something out of everyday life. The scene is a mall, a public space, which… has largely been abandoned as subject matter by painters and, more recently, even by photographers, who have chosen to use the Internet as their camera. Time has been halted so that all of it can be carefully gone over. In all of her work Larsen elevates the ordinary and banal into the domain of the astonishing. It is as if we never before looked at our lives so closely and carefully, which perhaps we haven't, certainly not like this."