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2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast

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Portals: The Potential of Refusal & Collaborative Photographic Spaces

Laura Larson, Samuel Lo, Gina Osterloh

Saturday, October 17 - 2:30PM to 3:30PM
Hopkins 250

Laura Larson, Samuel Lo, and Gina Osterloh will each present about current projects and collectively have a conversation regarding representation and identity, community, and collaboration through their photography. Larson, Lo and Osterloh will then invite the audience to ask questions and have dialogue together.

Laura Larson is an artist, educator, and Guggenheim Fellow (2023). Laura Larson's series All the Women I Know depict the women in her life, each turning away from the camera, a gesture at odds with the intimacy suggested in making a portrait. The series understands the word "woman" as an umbrella term, inclusive of all people who identify as women or who have had experiences coded as such, either by choice or social context. Larson explores what it means to resist representation, to turn away from the camera, and the significance of this gesture of refusal when depicting a woman. From a feminist perspective, the project contemplates connection: personal and political; familial and strategic; ties of affinity and of chance, mapping a constellation of possible relationships. As a typology, this archive of photographs considers the relationship between the individual and the collective and how to represent the social and political experiences of women in poetic terms. The contingencies of film photography—and the connection between pleasure and risk for the photographer—speaks to the strategies, stakes, and joys of the project. All the Women I Know celebrates the emancipatory potential of refusal as it takes account of our connections and differences across intersectional divides.

Samuel Lo is a photo-based artist, lecturer, and recently earned his MFA from The Department of Art at The Ohio State University (2026). Samuel Lo's photography explores the phenomenology of light and darkness, and how notions of identity are deeply intertwined with light, vision, visibility. For SPE, Lo will share photographs that ask viewers to consider how we may see less in the sun than we do in the darkness, and how light exposes us to societal pressures of being seen. Lo's current photographic project Seen in the Light, Known in the Dark brings attention to the limitations of light as a partial lens or filter for understanding, and darkness as a vessel for holding everything. Throughout his multi-medium and interdisciplinary art practice, Lo's photographs map the people, geographies, and constellations that guide me through the world as a mixed-race person through the photograph. Lo's photographs are both evidence and affirmations of the intertwining of experiences that would otherwise be interpreted as contradictory or dissonant. Lo processes this complexity through photographs of his body, family, friends, light, and darkness as well as communities, land and bodies of water across Ohio, Maryland and Hawaii.

Gina Osterloh is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice is grounded in photo tableau and performances for the camera. Osterloh is an Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University, Guggenheim Fellow (2024), and recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2023). Constructing sets and using materials that reflect the hand of the artist, Osterloh inverts the medium's conventions: flattened space is given an off-kilter volume, portraits assert a figure's anonymity, appearance and disappearance fill the same frame. Gina Osterloh's photography explores the relationship between vision, the perception of difference, and selfhood. For SPE, Gina Osterloh will share her current project with Samuel Lo (MFA, The Ohio State University 2026) and artist Annelise Duque (MFA, The Ohio State University 2025). Exploring themes of momentum, intergenerational connection and artistic production, collectively their project builds upon symbolic logics including eyes, hands, and portals.