Lauren dela Roche: No Man's Land by Eric Firestone Gallery

Lauren dela Roche No Man’s Land

May 1 – June 29, 2024

Essay by Robert Cozzolino

Eric Firestone Press 2024

Bodies of Infinite Joy

Kaleidoscope realms converge in Lauren dela Roche’s new work. Bodies, mirrored and reflected, sung out in echoes, reverberate across dimensions, touching past, present, and future. Fully corporeal yet gathered in ethereal spaces they inhabit many worlds simultaneously, ancestors and future beings coexisting and vibrating the surrounding atmosphere. Dela Roche’s women embody multiple identities, including her own, familial connections, goddesses, and saints. The heightened color, emphatic texture, and immersive scale in these ambitious new paintings represent an accumulative harvest of what has shaped her.

Dela Roche’s women reside within an environment we see and feel, sharing space with blooming flowers, radiant fountains, pollinators, birds, frolicking deer, and fish. The figure in Untethered Propagator (pl. 6) embraces a swan and merges with a butterfly. Together they affect their surroundings through a gentle fluttering of wings, the beating of a heart, breaths caressing plants into fertility, seeds dropping.

A hummingbird, silhouetted before abstracted blossom, emits a cone of sound or light from its beak in St Brigids Beaver Dam (pl. 10), revealing its relationship to the reclining women. The woman on the left rests serenely as her companion places wildflowers along the length of her body. An enormous snake winds around to encircle four women in Camel Back (pl. 16). Together they are connected through touch, arms, hands, fingertips, and knees resting against one another. Swans merge with the women’s bodies, suggesting that a transformation is taking place. This is echoed by the snake’s presence, linking all of the bodies together. As snakes shed their skin, regenerating in growth, so many of dela Roche’s figures may be in a metamorphosis, stretching, reaching, mirroring one another, and wholly immersed in their living environments.

Scenes such as this one reveal dela Roche’s conviction that humans must live within a relational mindset with biodiversity, communing with, stewarding, and rewilding ourselves in respect for communities of other organisms. She also asserts through her work a matter-of-fact coexistence with mystical powers and an ethereal world that flows from consciousness and unseen realms. Through that lens, birds are messengers from the spirit world, beings that move

ROBERT COZZOLINO

Lauren dela Roche, Untethered Propagator 2024. Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 32 x 32 inches

freely between sky, land, and sea. Bodies multiply as though occupying simultaneous dimensions, defying gravity, penetrating matter, and merging with their surroundings. Seed Eater (pl. 4) exemplifies this, her figures enacting a positive humanity, at one with streams of flowing water, creatures and plants, light and shadow. They swirl about, turning and curving as though moving time itself.

Dela Roche’s women may well be of our world, we might be able to see and interact with them, but their vibrant settings also witness cosmic rituals, performed beyond ordinary human perception. It calls to mind scim, an Irish word that accounts for what we see as well as what is concealed from us. Scim represents the gritty essence or material or residue that connects what we inhabit to the otherworld, making the transition point tangible, visceral. The writer

Manchán Magan notes that Scim means a thin coating of tiny particles, like limewash on a house or dust on a mantlepiece, but it can also mean a fairy film that covers the land, or a magical vision, or succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep So everything we think we see is not as it seems. Our bodies, fields, mountains and stars are elementary particles, vibrating and fluctuating constantly between existence and non-existence—swarming in space, even when it seems that nothing is there. They stretch out everywhere (and nowhere), combining to infinity, like the letters of a cosmic alphabet, creating the language of asteroids, cuttlefish, chocolate, goats and galaxies.

This seems relevant to dela Roche’s imagery. Her bodies live simultaneously in a corporeal world while enacting and affecting phenomena that exceed explanation. She allows us to see into realms separated by a thin veil. These moments come into focus as we peer into the distance and catch the otherworldly revealed when light refracts just so; we realize that we are living contiguous with the miraculous, the impossible, the fantastic. Dela Roche’s bodies are more than our humanity, they hold the cosmos, manifest as living earth, are endlessly regenerative, are themselves stars and constellations, pulsars of erotic joy.

Dela Roche’s recent choice of materials helps convey this duality. For the past two years she has been painting on old woven cotton feed sacks. She takes them apart, lays them out and begins working on them one at a time, eventually piecing together a full composition which she then sews together. The varied effect that light had on the painted and raw surfaces struck her right away. Light bounced off her imagery but was absorbed into the textured cotton, making the figures and designs project forward to phantasmagorical effect. Dela Roche is attuned to the nuances and peculiarities of varied surfaces, having worked on paper for so long. She understands how a substrate can physically transform her medium and emphasize symbolic associations.

That impact of visual dynamism and evocative meaning plays out over the feed sacks’ rich topography. Used for generations, softened, faded, and made thin through wear, they bear traces of living histories.

Filled with hauls from harvests and passed through family hands to feed communities, they represent networks of connection to the land and seasonal cycles. Dela Roche sees in them a link to generations of farmers concerned with biodiversity. For a time, she lived on her family’s land in Minnesota in a straw bale house she built, in an effort to live harmoniously with the environment. There she grew food, foraged, and considered what it might mean to rewild herself and

her communities, in reciprocity with plants and other non-human beings. Dela Roche became interested in the Earth First movement and the writings of Derrick Jensen, who asserts that so-called “civilization” brings nothing less than death to the planet.2 Living in nature and considering some of these ideas strengthened her conviction that we are interconnected through our environment.

Dela Roche has an eye for the sacks that show remnants of lives they have passed through and sustained. As she composes figures, they often form around mended tears and holes that were fixed by hand over successive generations. Painting over and around them activates these traces and connects them with the women she sends across their surfaces. Merged with the bodies, the cotton weave reads as skin, flesh that shows its histories, signs of trauma

Lauren dela Roche, Seed Eater 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 73 x 93 inches

Lauren dela Roche, detail of Infinity Pool 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 91 x 175 inches

and healing. Numerous examples of this juxtaposition occur in dela Roche’s new paintings. Stamps on the sacks become words printed on the skin or sheer tights. The same example, from Infinity Pool (pl. 2), shows how a mend in the sack becomes a startling spiderweb of thread, as though the flesh has been desperately reconstituted within a mesh wound. In another example from Infinity Pool a figure turns to reveal a mended hole encircled by a perimeter of additional stitches. Red thread along the woman’s thigh in Untethered Propagator (pl. 6) calls to mind ritual tattooing or scarification, marking the flesh to indicate rites of passage, personal milestones, and sacred events. In Propagator (pl. 15) two nubbins formed from an accretion of thread in the fabric look like nodules or growths, experiences from which the body might be healing.

Dela Roche allows that her women represent many beings and ideas, personal and mythic. They have multiple and overlapping identities, including her own, that of her sisters and mother, goddesses, Saint Brigid, lovers, and personified states of being. Women have been her primary subject since she was a teenager as an assertion of selfhood, a recognition of desire, and curiosity about others. She says, “The female figure feels like a projection of myself or a means of creating a relationship with myself, my sisters, my mother as in a film or play.”3 Most often, they represent Mother Earth—or the intuition of a goddess before there were other gods across cultures—the originating manifestation of sacred cycles in the full environment. In that larger role she has strength and magic and yet remains elusive, retaining her mystery as a deity. In performing the role of “a mythological figure,

such as Mother Earth,” dela Roche notes, “regenerative transformative things come out of her or are projected on her . . . the figure is the most grounded part but you can never quite place where she is and what position she’s in.”

Among dela Roche’s interests and sources lately are Irish folklore and ancient sacred practices. One persona for her powerful figures might be the Irish goddess Áine, governing biodiversity, involved with the fertility of the land, connected to sustenance, and sacred to the harvest. As a life-giving deity, she is connected with the River Shannon, as some scholars believe its name is derived from the Irish SeanÁine, “old Áine” referring to her role as the mother of the gods of Ireland. Dela Roche has picked up on her essence in composing fluid figures that suggest cycles of the seasons, abundance, and organic

interdependence as they impact the Earth.4 The bodies run through dela Roche’s compositions, often interacting with fountains, pouring water, anointing, cleansing, nourishing, and replenishing, as in Infinity Pool. In these ways, dela Roche uses bodies to represent infinite spiritual power and potential, asserting a multiplicity of associations. All bodies have this power, she seems to say, and her work shows them as full confident radiant beings.

Dela Roche’s work is also fed by more terrestrial sources. Her earliest interests connecting the body with desire, liberating transgression, and multiple meanings include the writings of Kathy Acker and Karen Finley, and Richard Kern’s films. Kern’s still wild, shocking, and exhilarating Submit to Me (1986) was “pivotal” for dela Roche at a time in which she was “very interested in understanding and undermining

Lauren dela Roche, detail of Propagator 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 32 x 38 inches

Still from Richard Kern, Submit to Me 1986, courtesy Richard Kern

Lauren dela Roche, detail of Untethered Propagator, 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 32 x 32 inches

Dela Roche discovered these artists in eighth and ninth grade while living in the Sonoma County California town of Cotati. She would skip school to hitchhike to a bookstore to read Acker’s books. In the cult film section of a local video store, she had access to Kern’s and other experimental filmmakers’ work. She reflects, “my experiences during that time . . . had a lot of influence on the formulation of my art practice and creative voice . . . including my obsession with film and reading . . . the video store is where I discovered . . . what I now know is called ‘transgressive’ cinema, which is where I learned about Lydia Lunch and Karen Finley. I was really really into this stuff, and it shaped my view of ‘feminism’. I would watch whatever kind of films I could find like this over and over . . . I think they were like my window to the outside world.”

Learning about these critical figures opened up new expressive possibilities for dela Roche and also helped name what she had craved and been thinking about with regard to her own identity. She ran away from home at age 15 and met her first girlfriend on the street. The young woman was a few years older than dela Roche, brought her home to her family, took her in and they fell in love. After a while her girlfriend started to claim that what they were doing was evil and urged dela Roche to accompany her family to their Pentecostal church. Her first experience of the congregation was intense and terrifying. On entering she witnessed the community in a frenzy, eyes rolled back in their heads, the preacher leading the group with a charismatic but intimidating voice, members speaking in tongues. The writhing scene frightened her, made her feel unsafe, and she fled outside. Her girlfriend reassured and coaxed her back in.

Everything changed when dela Roche was called up and the congregation prayed over her, laying on hands. “I felt an energy shift inside me, I fell to the ground,” she recounts, “and I felt like all of the breath was taken out of me. They put a blanket over me but then said they were going to pray the gay demons out power dynamics and figuring out feminine agency.”

In it, Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, and others perform an unhinged succession of feral sexual impulses, and violent self-possessed desire played out against the sonic backdrop of the Butthole Surfers in their swerving seasick prime. When Kern made Sonic Youth’s video for “Death Valley 69” (1985) he incorporated excerpts into its manic take on the Manson Family murders. These interests did not go over well in dela Roche’s home. When her mother discovered her stash of Acker books she destroyed them.

Egon Schiele, Two Reclining Nudes 1911, watercolor and graphite on paper, 22 ¼ x 14 ½ inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Lauren dela Roche, Big River 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 63 x 43 inches

of me.” This began what she now sees as an abusive cycle of her girlfriend wanting intimacy, but then accusing her of harboring demons in her body that were inspiring desire. As her girlfriend forced the issue of repentance, dela Roche attempted to use prayer to counter what was integral to who she was. She was young, vulnerable, and “under the love spell.”

Dela Roche worried that a family history of schizophrenia had emerged in her. Despite the situation grating against her intuition, she began to feel as though there were demons inside of her and would sometimes speak in tongues. After three years she was able to extract herself but it left a deep mark. “When I left the church, I could not talk about it or think about it without feeling like the demons were watching me. It was so steeped in shame around my sexuality that I could not talk about it for ten years,” she recalls. With distance she has reflected on some of the uncanny experiences that she had at the time.

There were times when she felt like she was lucid dreaming or having out-of-body experiences. In rare moments she felt that she had experienced precognition. Aspects of that engagement with the church now might show up as biblical references—the apple or serpent from the Garden of Eden, references to Baptismal waters, a myriad of heads emerging from flowers like rising seraphim.

Dela Roche connects threads of her work to seeds of resistance planted in that period of her life. “It was during such an oppressive time for me, coming out as gay, and dropping out of high school and leaving home but then being held captive into this church and not allowed to have friends,” she says. Discovering Acker, Finley, and Kern at that time, “had such a major impact on my psyche because of my circumstance.” In their examples, sexuality is identity harnessing agency and power. Transgression as affirmative and vibrant, surging through the body and coming out the top of the

head. It is the throughline that picks up in her current representation of women. “I’ve always prioritized and fostered my practice so I could draw them the way they want to be drawn, with their own agency, and it’s always that which delivers their safety,” she reflects.

That is part of the power of dela Roche’s work. She considers her art and the bodies within erotic in a way that has to do with understanding oneself and taking ownership of your desires. She places them in safe spaces where they can be themselves, uninhibited in ways that point to political re-assertions of the erotic as a human right, one that is inextricable from selfhood and connection, rather than sexualization. She adds, “I do think my work is erotic in a way that isn’t sexual, and it has to do with agency and power. I think my creativity has a meridian line back to that time period, where I was searching for agency and identity and love and power, and at the same time, feeling so oppressed by something I thought was supposed

to spiritually free me (the church) all the while being physically abused. It feels really relevant to my work because of its origins in my past.”

Dela Roche cites kinship in the work of other artists who depict the body in ways that show an understanding of erotic reverence and connection. A sacred sexuality that leaves the world and opens the possibility for transformation. During her late teens she went dumpster diving and found a postcard bearing a reproduction of a painting by Egon Schiele (1890–1918). For a long time she thought he was a woman artist because of the manner in which the nude was portrayed: sensual but powerful and in total ownership of their own body and desire. When dela Roche lived in Minnesota she became close to the Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie (1955–2022), whose work shows human beings activate the hidden realms that surround us with our actions and desires. Denomie often sketched and painted visions that came to him

Jim Denomie, Vision Quest - Spiritual Sex 2021. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. © Jim Denomie Estate, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis

Lauren dela Roche, Atomic Gardener, 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 31 x 37 inches

Bob Thompson (1937–1966), The Struggle 1963, oil on canvas, 58 x 78 inches / 147.3 x 198.1 cm, signed; © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

in dreams and explored how consciousness was affected by and affected the spirit world and our interdependent ecosystems. Dela Roche and Denomie shared an admiration for Bob Thompson (1937–1966) whose compositions overlay riffs from art history with fantastic color and enigmatic scenes painted in a visual language akin to music.

Dela Roche also powerfully extends the way that women artists since the 1960s have reclaimed sensual bodies and explored their meanings and possibilities. Her work has kinship with Martha Edelheit (b. 1931), by depicting matter-of-fact, all bodies are beautiful, inclusive celebrations of the human form. Edelheit’s large, bold paintings often employ strategies of repetition, enacting a call and response rhythm that derives from her early

experience in performance. Of her generation, dela Roche’s work fits into a context that includes both Erin Riley’s (b. 1985) imagery about personal experience and self-examination, and that of Christina Forrer (b. 1978), who comingles myth, folklore, and observations of family life. It is interesting to note that dispersed throughout dela Roche’s paintings one can find design motifs extracted from or inspired by the channeled imagery of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). No

Man’s Land is a testament to her omnivorous visual appetite. These points of inspiration find thoughtful transformations for her own meanings.

Dela Roche uses bodies to represent infinite spiritual power and potential, asserting their multiplicity of associations. Bodies have this power and dela Roche’s work shows them in their full confident

radiant beings. Asserting joyous sensuality now can be an explicit opposition to war and fascism. Her use of repetition is like a mantra or a prayer, asserting the possibilities our lives and world can have. These paintings bring to mind Audre Lorde’s gorgeous writing about the erotic She writes,

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotions, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.5

For Lorde, claiming agency over our erotic selves, tapping into that which is within us, is necessarily about feeling deeply in all parts of our lives, demanding nothing less than what we spend time on to be commensurate with our capacity for joy. She says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”6 This can transform our world, and is critical to making a new world, the one we want, we deserve. It is by necessity a political action. “In touch with the erotic,” she says, “I become less willing

Lauren dela Roche, Camel Back 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 42 x 77 inches

Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Table 1965, oil on canvas, 80 x 195 in, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Mary Ingebrand-Pohlad Endowment for Twentieth Century Paintings and the William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 2019.24A-C, © 2024 Martha Edelheit / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”7

Lauren dela Roche’s new work visually reasserts these words and challenges us in this moment to consider how the power of erotic agency can transform our relationship to ourselves, one another, the ecology of our planet, and the future we want. They represent a possible present if we only choose to act out of love and without fear. ◾

1 Manchán Magan, Thirty-Two Worlds for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Language (Dublin: Gill Books, 2020), 34–35.

2 Derrick Jensen’s writings appear in several books and he has a website that gathers resources together. For an introduction to his point of view see: https:// orionmagazine.org/article/ beyond-hope/

3 All quotes from Lauren dela Roche come from correspondence and conversations with the author between March 18th and April 18th, 2024.

4 Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak: A journey into the wisdom of what lies beneath us (Dublin: Gill Books, 2022), 38–39.

5 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 56.

6 Lorde, 57.

7 Lorde, 58.

ROBERT COZZOLINO is an independent art historian, critic and curator based in Minneapolis. He frequently collaborates with contemporary artists and communities to examine history and its perpetual impact on the present. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021), World War I and American Art (2016), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014), and David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014).

Lauren dela Roche, St Brigids Beaver Dam, 2024, acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish, 39 x 40 inches

Lauren dela Roche in her studio, St. Louis, Missouri, 2024. Photo by Curtis Campanelli

Erin M. Riley, the hunted 2022, wool, cotton, 48 x 45 inches. Courtesy

Erin M. Riley and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo: JSP Art Photography

The Exhibition

Feminine Echoes from the Pastoral Underground 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 96 x 72 inches

Orb Weaver, 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 53 x 36 inches

4 Seed Eater, 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish

73 x 93 inches

(detail follows)

Lobster Tail 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 73 x 108 inches

Untethered Propagator 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 32 x 32 inches

Snake in the Grass 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack with acrylic varnish 52 x 83 inches

8 Camel Back 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish

42 x 77 inches

(detail opposite)

10 St Brigids Beaver Dam 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 39 x 40 inches (detail follows)

9 Big River 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 63 x 43 inches

Cobalt Blue, 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish 50 x 35 inches

Ladybug 2023

Acrylic on cotton feedsack with acrylic varnish

x 67 inches

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish

Propagator, 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish

32 x 38 inches 14

Tarantula 2024

Acrylic on found cotton feedsack and acrylic varnish

36 x 57 inches

Lauren dela Roche

b. Santa Rosa, California, 1983 Lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024 No Man’s Land, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

2022 Day Lily, Sean Horton (Presents), New York, NY

2018 Collected Vessels Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2016 Silent Partner Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2023 Beauty of Summer, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

2022 Do Sandlocks Dream of the Wind?, Eritage Art Projects, Lisbon, Portugal

Snake Whiskey Still Life and Other Stories Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA

2021 Spring Show, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2020 Of Course, Where Else, Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN Crescendo, New Image Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Material Fair Bockley Gallery and co. (company projects), Mexico City, Mexico

2019 Delphian X Guts, The Factory, London, U.K. Psychic Reader: Brad Kahlhamer, Lauren Roche, Aaron Spangler, co. (company projects), Scottsdale, AZ

Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Bring Me Home, Forage Modern Workshop, Minneapolis, MN

2018 Selected Works: Winter 2018, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

Let’s Go, Burnett Fine Art, Wayzata, MN

Winter: A Group Show, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2017–18 Collecting Art, Hair + Nails, Minneapolis, MN

2017 Ocotillo Stella Elkins Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA Summer Group Show, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

Lauren dela Roche in her studio, St. Louis, Missouri, 2024. Photo by Macayli

2015 Sinister Luminosity Four Fresh Perspectives in Painting

Ryan Fontaine, Tynan Kerr, Andrew Mazorol, Lauren Roche, Oval Headley Fine Art, Portland, OR

Hausmann

2015 Temporary Autonomous Contemporary Art Minneapolis, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2014 Temporary Autonomous Museum of Contemporary Art Minneapolis, 3400 Cedar Avenue Pop-Up, Minneapolis, MN

Two Dark Horses, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2013 Edge of Camp, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

Jasper Hotel, Fargo, ND

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND

2024 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence, New Orleans, LA

2021 Bed-Stuy Art Residency, Brooklyn, NY

2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, New York, NY

2012–13 Jerome Emerging Artists Fellowship, Jerome Foundation, St. Paul, MN

“Midwest #167,” New American Paintings, August 2023/ September 2023.

Harper’s Magazine September 2023, (illustrated, p. 55).

“Artist Spotlight: Lauren dela Roche,” BOOOOOOOM.com, April 14, 2023.

S. Blanquet, “La Tranchée Racine,” United Dead Artists, No. 21, July 2021.

A. Martin, “Of Course, Where Else at Nemeth Art Center,” Design and Living Magazine, August 4, 2020.

M. Zemtsova, “Lauren dela Roche,” Art Maze Magazine Edition 17, May 2020, (illustrated, p. 150, 151).

B. Kranz, “Foreign, but familiar: Lauren Roche turns dissociation into surreal artwork,” MPLSART.COM, April 10, 2019.

L. Wamback, “Collected Vessels,” In Review, March, 2018.

A. Eler, “The ritualist art of Lauren Roche at Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis,” StarTribune March 29, 2018.

S. Regan, “Lauren Roche: Collected Vessels,” City Pages March 28, 2018.

T. Dylan, “A Museum with an Expiration Date,” Southwest Journal January 2015.

T. Dylan, “Wild Things: A Quartet of Young Artists returns to Bockley Gallery,” Southwest Journal April 2014.

N. Smith, “Lauren Roche’s Visceral, Evocative, and Singular Paintings,” Beautiful Decay April 2014.

C. Shmid, “Descent into Darkness: Two Dark Horses,” Artpulse Magazine March 2014.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Lauren dela Roche for entrusting us with this exhibition. We appreciate the passion and dedication she put into this show, her inspiring work, and kind spirit. It’s a privilege to work with her! Thank you to Robert Cozzolino for his thoughtful essay on this body of work; we are grateful for the care that he put into his conversations with the Lauren and the beautiful text that followed. For generously allowing their images to be used in this catalogue, we would like to thank Curtis Campanelli, Martha Edelheit, Macayli Hausmann, Richard Kern, and Erin Riley as well as the institutions, estates, and galleries who facilitated image clearances for this publication. Thank you to the entire staff at Eric Firestone Gallery who make everything we do possible!

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Lauren dela Roche: No Man’s Land May 1 – June 29, 2024 on view at Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

ISBN: 979-8-9885944-4-4

LCCN: 2024911286

Cover: Detail of Seed Eater, see pl. 4

Frontispiece: Lauren dela Roche in her studio, St. Louis, Missouri, 2024. Photo by Macayli Hausmann

Inside front and back covers: Detail of Feminine Echoes from the Pastoral Underground see pl. 1

Eric Firestone Press

Reproduction of contents prohibited

Published by

Eric Firestone Press

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

Principal: Eric Firestone

Managing Partner: Kara Winters

Senior Director: Jennifer Samet

Associate Director: Maddy Henkin

Principal Photography: Sam Glass

Design: Isabelle Smeall Printing: GHP

Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street New York, NY 10012

646-998-3727

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

631-604-2386

Ericfirestonegallery.com

— Eric Firestone