Dust bitten of the shrinking variety
A new exhibition by Lauren Michelle Peterson
Now showing at Plough Gallery, 216 West 8th Street, Tifton, Georgia
Lauren Peterson installing her new show.
LAUREN M PETERSON / ARTIST STATEMENT
1208 N Toombs St. Valdosta, GA 31601 / 443.480.6380
[email protected] / www.laurenmichellepeterson.com
I collect devalued objects such as used furniture, discarded housewares, packaging, and textiles. I use these objects as painterly marks to intuitively build abstract compositions. Considering material properties and limitations, I negate the objects’ use-function in favor of its aesthetic capacities. My recent work focuses on expectation and disappointment. I consider absurdity in domestic maintenance and rituals that beautify and strive for an ideal. Subverting the spectacle of decoration I push the seductively beautiful towards overwhelmingly sickening. My interest lies at the tipping point like when one consumes too many skittles and feels ill despite the initially gratifying sugar surge. My sewn, stuffed, wrapped, and painted assemblages are mutations of familiar forms turned abject. These forms are components, able to be rearranged within an installation, stand alone, or be taken apart and repurposed in order to deny the idea of progress having an objective conclusion.
My primary motivation in the studio is play and often anchors in a capacity for humor. I find perfection laughable and instead allow my forms to succumb to gravity, mistakes of my own hand, and the inclinations of their materials. I use awkwardness, and exaggeration to point towards artificiality and consider the slippery demarcation between useful and useless, appealing and repellent. Challenging the normative hierarchy of value, I reject objects as symbols as a way for me to nullify gender and social expectations.
1208 N Toombs St. Valdosta, GA 31601 / 443.480.6380
[email protected] / www.laurenmichellepeterson.com
I collect devalued objects such as used furniture, discarded housewares, packaging, and textiles. I use these objects as painterly marks to intuitively build abstract compositions. Considering material properties and limitations, I negate the objects’ use-function in favor of its aesthetic capacities. My recent work focuses on expectation and disappointment. I consider absurdity in domestic maintenance and rituals that beautify and strive for an ideal. Subverting the spectacle of decoration I push the seductively beautiful towards overwhelmingly sickening. My interest lies at the tipping point like when one consumes too many skittles and feels ill despite the initially gratifying sugar surge. My sewn, stuffed, wrapped, and painted assemblages are mutations of familiar forms turned abject. These forms are components, able to be rearranged within an installation, stand alone, or be taken apart and repurposed in order to deny the idea of progress having an objective conclusion.
My primary motivation in the studio is play and often anchors in a capacity for humor. I find perfection laughable and instead allow my forms to succumb to gravity, mistakes of my own hand, and the inclinations of their materials. I use awkwardness, and exaggeration to point towards artificiality and consider the slippery demarcation between useful and useless, appealing and repellent. Challenging the normative hierarchy of value, I reject objects as symbols as a way for me to nullify gender and social expectations.
Click thumbnails below to see Lauren's Original Drawings available through Plough Gallery.
