Iris Love
- Editor at Titan Contemporary Publishing
- Oct 24
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 5
Iris Love is an assemblage artist, painter, printmaker, and draftswoman who has exhibited in Tennessee. Recent exhibitions include multiple showings at Gallery 1010 and Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She has been published by The Daily Beacon and several times by Phoenix Magazine. Iris’ awards include the Distinguished Tennessean Scholarship from University of Tennessee and the Hope Scholarship from the State of Tennessee. The main inspiration for Iris’ works comes from literature, as she describes: “I begin with a lot of reading and writing as I am constantly engaging with different books, writing down as well as underlining phrases and ideas which stick out to me”.
The freehand assemblage work, paintings, prints, and drawings of Iris Love range from still life to conceptually-collaged imagery. From incorporating found objects, such as frames, into her art to creating paintings which seem like collage of incorporating several images at once based on her photography, these works have an enhanced investigative approach. She explores visual motifs, such as a floating deer taxidermy mount floating in the air amidst a hand holding a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, in order to convey both irony and aesthetics of the imagery she finds. The images in her works are based on real-life experiences, such as travel or organizing a still life. In such a regard, Iris Love’s works have an arthouse documentary approach to capturing actual observations from daily life and reinterpreting them for new conceptual purposes, such as reconfiguring their presented structure.
Based on freehand applications, the works often contain a ‘sketchy’ aesthetic. The basis for the renderings in Iris Love’s works reveal deeply interpretative notions, carefully studying her subject matter and conveying expressive qualities, as opposed to presenting confined forms. With a sense of collage and sometimes incorporating assemblage, the restructuring of imagery within the various works represents a redisplay and redistribution of imagery intake. From several sources, she often discovers a connection between subjects and form, such as pigeons and urban motifs of street lights. In such a regard, she will assemble the images to communicate a direct conceptual connection between the symbolic representations. The still life works and landscapes represent observational studies reinterpreted by either incorporating found imagery, or displaying various items to provide a message, such as cigarette butts placed near food or a lighter placed on a plate. Such particular props suggest a display of excess and comfort.
Michigan Summer (Part 2) (pictured above) and other similar works represent some of Iris Love’s most conceptual works. These assemblage paintings incorporate two separate images, one of landscape and the other of still life in one work of art, both seemingly related in concept (perhaps regional food or expressions of comfort) but disjointed visually. The ‘inner landscape’ becomes confined with a frame placed upon the surface. As a result, we are presented with a cherished moment and newfound value of memory as well as fleeting time.
With a variety of approaches and a knack for experimentation, Iris Love invokes conceptual investigations of arthouse documentary approaches. Her freehand, collage-like configurations represent observational irony as well as appreciation. She dives into visual motifs based on real firsthand experiences, based on her own photography or observed in life, and constructs dichotomies between related symbols based on their associations with each other. The contrast would entail their structural layout, which incorporates a collage-like configuration, establishing a distortion of perspective.
