Sophie T. Lvoff

Sophie T. Lvoff (b. 1986, New York) received a BFA from New York University in 2008 and an MFA from Tulane University in 2013. Her work has been in exhibited in the US at Grand Central Terminal, MTA Arts for Transit; Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; The Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Aperture Foundation, New York; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland FL; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans. International exhibitions include The Multi-Media Museum Moscow House of Photography, Moscow; Fototeca de Centro de las Artes, Monterrey; Musée Batha, Fes; Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing; Galerie Azzedine Alaïa, Paris; Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne; Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; and IAC, Villeurbanne, France. Her work has been published in Artforum, The Guardian, and Daily Serving, and Lvoff has a collaborative artist book published through Press Street, New Orleans in 2012. In May 2013, Lvoff had her first solo show at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans. Lvoff lives and works in New Orleans and New York.

Sophie T. Lvoff moved from New York to New Orleans in 2009, drawn to the romantic South masterfully documented by such photographers as Walker Evans and William Eggleston. Since then, she has been entranced by the mystical beauty of the city. While the light, color palette, and prominence of tradition in the region are now the foundation of her practice, she has become equally aware of the threats to this beauty. From both environmental and sociological perspectives, and further influenced by the political and social atmosphere, Lvoff situates her practice as a “truthful” display of the South, beyond its celebrations and devastations.

In recent large photographs such as Toledano Street (2011) and South Claiborne (Cadillac) (2012), Lvoff documents invasive vines, dirty sidewalks, fading paint, and graffiti. However, it is the dynamic colors of the sky, burgeoning plants, and historic buildings in their fecund yet tragic beauty which stay with the viewer. Lvoff focuses on the liminality of both the old New Orleans and the new: while she tracks the same geographic realm as an earlier generation of Southern photographers, she in no way shies from the city’s twenty-first-century transformations. The artist will be presenting a new series for Prospect.