Lorena Lohr and the motel myth

American motels hold a captivating mythology. Picturing them might make you feel nostalgic for places you’ve never visited. America has a vastness that demands them. They serve as crucial waystations across the country’s sprawling landscapes. In the heart of deserts, they offer respite to weary truckers and refuge to conceal secret affairs in secluded rooms. Unlike Travelodges or Premier Inns, motels exude a mysterious, kitschy allure. For artist Lorena Lohr, who has travelled across America for over a decade, motels are repositories of images and stories that have become the backbone of a series that commemorates her time in the desert.

Primarily a photographer, Lohr never thought she’d be a painter. The idea still surprises her. “I didn’t go to art school. I just taught myself,” she tells me via video from her New York apartment. “It took such a long time, so I’m just glad whenever I can create something.” What began as a love of photography – documenting the overlooked details of America’s motels, highways and forgotten corners of roadside towns – has since evolved into something more intricate and, in her words, somewhat “insane”. “I decided that I needed to paint this one image of a naked woman in the desert, in a Renaissance style, but I didn’t know how to paint,” she admits. She set about teaching herself through a painstaking process, bordering on obsessive. “I would stay up all night with a tiny brush just moving a tiny bit of paint around.” Working out of a closet in her apartment, inhaling paint fumes and chain-smoking, she made paintings on a miniature scale. Even now, her largest works are only around 11 x 14 inches.

Lohr’s latest exhibition, ‘Motel Nudes’ at Soho Revue, is the culmination of years of wandering, documenting and assembling fragments of an America that exists on the margins. Expanding on her ongoing Desert Nudes series, portraits of women that feel both classical and kitsch, ‘Motel Nudes’ takes us into a world of solitude and subtle rebellion. The series emerged from a very specific conversation: “My friend’s relative died, and she was joking about how she’d gone to an Italian cemetery, seen the tombstones, and wanted me to paint her tombstone portrait.” Lohr became fascinated by the imagery – tinted photographs inlaid in marble, some solemn, others glamourous, capturing a kind of self-presentation beyond the grave.

The show features 17 porthole-style paintings, small enough to be mistaken for Victorian lovers’ tokens or devotional keepsakes, but offering a world of their own and inviting us to peer in and linger inside. In contrast to the typical cowboy canon in painting, marked by races, shootouts and archetypal machismo, Lohr presents her own counter-mythology. There are no lone gunslingers on horseback here, but women in quiet, unhurried reverie. Nude figures languor on motel beds or frazzled carpets, cigarette smoke curling in the air. They are self-assured and alone, but their solitude isn’t pitiful – it is their own. There is no second cup of coffee on the bedside table, no messy sheets hinting at an absent lover.

A strange mixture of references echos through Lohr’s work: the cool detachment of Edward Hopper’s interiors, the delicacy of Northern Renaissance nudes and the sentimentality of Victorian trinkets. Her work feels like a glimpse into a reality at the crossroads of memory and mirage, comfortingly familiar yet just out of reach. The women in them charm us as silent spectators, but leave no room for us to join them. These scenes are shaped by Lohr’s own experiences of traveling alone across the American Southwest, of being watched with suspicion, of existing as an anomaly in spaces that often cater to men. “I travel by myself a lot. When I was alone, I’d get looked at like ‘what is she doing here?’ Like there was something wrong with me, and it would be really annoying. I didn’t like that I couldn’t do the things that a man could do. I would think about what it would be like to feel very at ease in this moment, so I started drawing naked women in bars, or in very classic American-male-fantasy type situations. In contrast to this, the idea of the male lone traveller is one that is very heroic, so these women are my own version of that.” The women in ‘Motel Nudes’ possess a quiet defiance in simply existing without explanation.

There is a cinematic quality to Lohr’s work – a suspended tension of a forgotten commuter town at dusk. She recalls being stranded in Barstow, California, after a deranged train conductor refused to let her reboard. “I just sat there in shock as the train lights went down the track. It was actually really beautiful – the desert, the red lights.” She was helped by a family who, as it turned out, were the same people who had brought Erin Brockovich to the town nearby to investigate corporate pollution. “They put me on the phone with her and she was so awesome. She’d just been arrested for drunken boating. She was like, ‘this is so fucked!’” It’s this kind of absurd serendipity that pulses throughout Lohr’s work, a willingness to submit to the unknown. Her paintings, much like her photographs, draw attention to the details that exist just at the edges of consciousness. “The small details are very important. I’m interested in Northern Renaissance and medieval painting, where you have all these seemingly mundane objects in the corners, but they’re rendered with a kind of sacredness or holiness.” The desert, in particular, possesses a similar kind of power for her. “It’s an otherworldly place. If you don’t grow up in it, then it can feel mystifying – the scale of it and the fact that you can see so much sky.”

Despite the deeply personal nature of her paintings, Lohr resists overanalysing them. It’s about instinct above all else: the work should be about creating something because the impulse is there, and following it wherever it leads. “I don’t feel like I’m in control of what I do, apart from the desire to do it. I don’t try and put anything into context too much, that’s for other people to do.” Yet, looking at her work, it’s hard not to see a kind of self-portraiture woven throughout, not just in subject but in spirit – a soft defiance, a transient beauty, and the ineffable pull of the road.