Lola Shepard is thrilled to present THE SPIRITS THAT LEND STRENGTH, a virtual solo exhibition featuring the evocative, otherworldly photomontages of LINDA PLAISTED. The exhibition debuts online at the gallery’s website on Thursday, June 26, 2025, at 10:00 AM and runs through July 31, 2025.

THE SPIRITS THAT LEND STRENGTH showcases the inimitable photomontage process of Linda Plaisted, a multidisciplinary American artist whose work spans photography, painting, and mixed media. Approaching her artmaking as both an artist and a historian, Plaisted integrates these practices to illuminate personal and collective narratives, weaving translucent layers of memory and meaning into each piece. Guided by her commitment to champion women and Mother Earth, she uses her art to transcend the boundaries of traditional media and reveal deeper truths.

The exhibition features work from three recent series completed between 2024 and 2025: The Lost Landscapes, How the Light Gets In, and Todos Santos. Each body of work embodies Plaisted’s unique synthesis of original photography and paintings with found images, ancestral documents, and collected ephemera. Her pioneering compositions evoke a profound sense of history and myth, honoring the untold stories of women and seeking to heal ancestral wounds. By collaging her own imagery with historical and vernacular materials, she creates digital mixed-media works that intertwine personal narratives, folklore, and dreamlike symbolism.

In her 2025 series The Lost Landscapes, Linda Plaisted revisits a body of work she first developed two decades earlier. Constructing entirely fictional terrains from fragments of found landscape photographs, she creates imagined worlds that exist solely in the memory of her own imagination. By layering these original photographs with newly created images and collaged ephemera, Plaisted explores the fragility of life and the inexorable passage of time. This series can be understood as a dialogue with her past selves, earlier versions of herself that were more hopeful and perhaps a bit naïve. Through these works, she endeavors to gather and integrate the scattered fragments of her identity, striving toward a sense of wholeness to face the uncertainties of the future.

In her 2024 series How the Light Gets In, Plaisted responds to the terminal cancer diagnosis of a close friend. Seeking solace, she turned to the natural world. Drawing upon ancient Indigenous cultural beliefs that stars are holes in the sky through which ancestors watch over the living, she created this series by layering her own landscape photographs with found images and collected printed paper fragments to produce unfixed collages that emphasize the transient and delicate nature of life. Over these layered works, she paints abstract dot patterns, then rephotographs the compositions and meticulously pierces each print with hundreds of tiny holes to allow light to pass through, symbolizing the interconnection of loss and renewal. Trees and animals within these works signify humanity’s enduring connection to the natural world, while the distressed paper materials evoke the impermanence of all things. Mounted on cradled birch panels and finished with paint, encaustic, and cold wax, these pieces synthesize photography, fine art, psychology, and myth, transforming grief into a luminous meditation on resilience.

In another 2024 series, entitled Todos Santos, Plaisted turns her focus to women’s narratives and the significance of familial bonds as stabilizing forces in turbulent times. She employs paper collage elements to represent the “paper trail” of matrilineal ancestry, with photographic depictions of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends forming the foundation of the imagery. Inspired by her genealogical research that uncovered previously unknown stories of her own maternal ancestors, Plaisted honors these women through her art. Faces in works such as "Mending" and "Sun and Moon" are intentionally obscured to represent not only one individual but a collective embodiment of all women. This series speaks to the innate wisdom, dignity, and creative force within women.

THE SPIRITS THAT LEND STRENGTH is a testament to Plaisted’s lifelong dedication to weaving history, mythology, and the ephemeral into deeply personal yet broadly atmospheric works of art. By synthesizing family photos, vernacular images, documents, and her own photography, she creates works that merge mythic archetypes with personal stories, transforming them into universally resonant visual narratives that speak to the soul.

LINDA PLAISTED was born in Pennsylvania in 1967 and now lives and works in Frederick, Maryland. She studied at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, Temple University, and George Mason University, where she earned degrees in Fine Art, Illustration, and Literature. A 2002 magna cum laude graduate of GMU, her final portfolio was recognized as the most creative in her graduating class. Plaisted’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including recent exhibitions at PhotoPlace Gallery (Middlebury, VT), Atlanta Photography Group (Atlanta, GA), A. Smith Gallery (TX), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Praxis Photo Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), Texas Woman’s University (Denton, TX), the Southeast Center for Photography (Greenville, SC), Women’s Photo Alliance (New York, NY), Verum Ultimum Gallery (Portland, OR), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), South x Southeast Gallery (Decatur, GA), Slip Gallery (Seattle, WA), the Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (Providence, RI), Fayetteville State University (Fayetteville, NC), and Monmouth University Center for the Arts (West Long Branch, NJ). Her work has been published in various prestigious publications and newspapers including 5x7, Artdoc, The Boston Globe, Canvas Rebel, Black & White Photography, Photo Trouvée, Lenscratch, Shots, CatchLight, Wilder Roam, and Camas, among others. She was a 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award winner and a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 200 Finalist in both 2023 and 2024.

Note: All works in the exhibition are available as limited-edition archival pigment prints, offering collectors a museum-grade representation of Plaisted’s visionary art.

View the virtual exhibition at www.LOLASHEPARD.com

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