(extension) ISSUE 04
Dear readers, This issue is about extension. Art, music, fashion, and writing serve as a way to extend our identity, to externalize the elements of ourselves that build our sense of self. These things often feel intrinsically our own, yet through art we often find the ways they, instead, connect us together. In this issue we interviewed a set of artists who explore this theme through varying mediums. Joy Miessi’s work centralizes around her identity as a woman of color and how this interacts with the standards of beauty that exist in the UK, where she was raised. Lauren Kalman’s jewelry and metalsmithing challenges the social structures that dictate norms of the female body. Laurie Franck uses tattoo and photography as mediums to think about human forms. We also received some great writing, photo, and art submissions. Thank you to everyone who submitted. We really appreciate all of it. For future submissions, send your writings, photos, artwork, or whatever else to inbtwncollective@gmail.com. Enjoy!
Always,
Taylor Seamans founder / editor-in-chief instagram: @inbtwnmag
what page is ..? 02 // Joy Miessi 10 // Rebecca Katz
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17 14 // Laurie Franck 28 // Lauren Kalman
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in rhythm Smile More // Syd Every Single Thing // HOMESHAKE My Jinji // Sunset Rollercoaster Ryd // Steve Lacy Loving Is Easy // Rex Orange County Brake Lights // Omar Apollo Peace Blossom Boogy // The Babe Rainbow (aus) I Need a Man // Sam Evian Road Head // Japanese Breakfast Amor de Siempre // Cuco Tesselation // Mild High Club Young // Frankie Cosmos Kokopelli // Mild High Club Pram // Omar Apollo Everybody Wants Someone // Joel Jerome Golden Days // Whitney
music Selection: Erin Clifford
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Self-documentation of a dual identity
Q: What mediums do you work in? Joy: At the moment I’ve been using oil bars, pastels, acrylic paint, card, fine liners, etc. I use whatever is accessible to me and that leaves a mark. I’ve been looking to explore outside of what I know which has brought me to experiment with clay, fabric, etc. in the past year through collaborations. I would really like to learn more within digital art and filmmaking. I want to look back at my artistic timeline and see experimentation, variety, and to allow myself to learn and explore so that I can be multidisciplinary. Q: A lot of your work seems to center around your dual identity. Can you describe the two sides of your identity? Joy: I guess I never see it as separate as the intersection makes up me. My parents are Congolese, however, I was born here in the UK. I’m often referred to as first generation or of the African diaspora. I am British but made to feel other because of my race. I am Congolese but left feeling other because of where I was born. My upbringing has been of the two; Congolese at home, the food we ate, the traditions we held, the way our home looked, but then growing up ‘British’ outside of that: the language/slang, the way we dressed to match the trends, and the overall environment. As a child I never thought too much about it, but now I recognize why I had this looming sense of displacement at home and also when visiting family in Congo. It feels like I don’t fully belong in either place. I make work that reflects my identity, as a mirror, documenting my existence like a diary, and so my feelings surrounding my identity is second nature within the work that I make. Q: Growing up, in what ways was your identity challenged or questioned? Joy: In primary school, I was the other. I was teased for my lack of knowledge on traditional British food such as Cottage pies (which I now love) and ‘bangers and mash’ and laughed at for the foods I did eat such as kwanga and pondu. From primary school to university, I’ve regularly had the ‘where are you really from?’ question thrown at me. It’s peak was probably university, where alot of people approached me with racist intentions. Q: Your work seems deeply personal, intrinsically linked to your own identity, yet with an impact
that extends to others as well. Can you talk a little bit about your intentions with your work? Joy: I like that people can relate or find a connection within my work and hopefully make them feel less isolated or alone in terms of their identity. When I make my work, it is for myself, it isn’t for an audience, so maybe it’s this unfiltered honesty that people can relate with topics of gender, sex, queerness, race, and beauty. Q: How did your style develop? I described it initially as intriguing and somewhat visceral— it has this really interesting quality of feeling thought out yet unstructured, all at the same time. Joy: [It developed] through constant experimentation, allowing myself to combine techniques and embracing mistakes. It’s been a natural path I started from making stop-motion animation videos in collage, black and white drawings, portraits, typography pieces, and so on. My work at the moment is a combination of all those techniques, but it isn’t my end point. My work will look different in years to come as long as I accept artistic critique and challenge myself to work with materials or think in a way that is new to me. Q: How does your use of text allow you to articulate your message further? Joy: For me, text allows me to be clear, to be unapologetic in my message and translates how I feel clearer than image can at times. I’m learning to see the art in my notes and writing, and I like to keep that in my work without translating into image. Q: You have a Vimeo that captures you over time creating a piece. I feel like there’s something special about seeing the work in progress, the steps of the piece that maybe can’t be isolated in the final work. How does this documentation extend the depth of the piece? Joy: We are used to seeing finished pieces in a portfolio, in a gallery, or on a website. I’ve found the process, the documentation of that, to be quite a key moment, and so my videos and my work in progress images are that. It shows the path from A to B, the order, the layering. It completes the final piece by giving it a backstory. Q: Your work centers around ideas of identity and social beauty standards. How would you
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“As I am learning to reject these standards, this unlearning is being documented through my artwork for self-reflection.” define the majority sense of beauty in the UK? What kinds of people does it exclude, and how is your work a commentary or critique of these standards? Joy: I made a piece called Central/ Centralise which reads “EXPECTED TO CENTRALISE MY IMAGE ON MAINSTREAM BEAUTY…” which describes my relationship with ‘beauty’ standards. Magazine covers, the love interest in movies, and Google search results of beauty— mainstream beauty— fail to reflect women that look like me. I’ve grown up feeling like I am far from what beauty is. I am not white, skinny, nor is my hair straight. My hair coils towards the sun, my nostrils are round and wide, and my skin is black. I am black. Black is depicted as the other. Beauty standards held by media and society have constantly compared me in this lense, and WOC, black women in particular, are often excluded from what is seen as ‘beauty’ (in a mainstream sense). I made the piece Central/ Centralise after my trip to Congo where I felt a pressure to change my hair from its natural state and where there was an overwhelming amount of adverts marketing skin lightening products. I comment on what is real, what is happening right now, and how I feel in this space, in society. As I am learning to reject these standards, this unlearning is being documented through my artwork for selfreflection. Q: Can you speak a little bit about the “We Are Here” project that you were a part of and what the mission of this is? Joy: “We Are Here” started out as an idea
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by illustrator Erin Aniker (@erinaniker). We bumped into each other at another exhibition and started talking about the EU referendum. Erin told me about this project she wanted to push, and I was interested so we met up a few times and started developing the project. We paired up with artist Jess Nash (@jess__nash) and curator Ellen Morrison (@ellen_morrison) to bring the project to life. “We Are Here” is about highlighting the voices of BAME British Women in the current political context. It had felt like the referendum had increased the already present hate targeted at minority groups, from newspapers encouraging fear to racist comments on the street, people used the EU referendum to justify their racism. We created an exhibition, with discussions and workshops, as part of the program showcasing amazing work by BAME Brit women artists. “We Are Here” is about us, it is about community, it is to show that we are valid, we are British, and that we are here. Q: Are there other artists or people who inspire your work, how so? Joy: At the moment, I’m really inspired by the works by Hamed Maiye, Ben Biayenda, and Nwaka Okparaeke. The strength and stories within their images make me want to write narratives to the scenes they’ve created. I’m also continuously inspired by literature and works by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. They’ve encouraged me to write and explore poetry within my own work. Finally, Basquiat’s unapologetic and expressive style holds an influence in my collage work, but my primary influences for my work as a whole are black women writers.
Central/Centralise, 2017
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Where I Was Invisible?, 2017
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“Brother,” pins
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35mm // Erin Clifford
I thought to myself, “I know myself,” and in this thought, I knew I didn’t.
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Los Angeles, // Rebecca Katz
When I entered my mother’s room it was dark. I could only make out her shape. I could not see the sprawling view of the San Fernando Valley outside of her window or the posed family photos on her wall. A weak voice emerged from the darkness. “Honey, would you get me the phone? We should head to the hospital.” I stood there like a lost traveller in the wrong area of town, unable to speak the language. I summoned myself to go through the motions, but when I stepped out of the darkness into the light of our comfy Los Angeles living room, I began to softly weep. For the past ten years of my life, my mother pretended her cancer did not exist. Because the chronic Leukemia had been largely controlled, we were able to shove it into our familiar family closet of Denial. Buried under secrets of financial complications and whispers of divorce, we didn’t dare add the C word to our daunting list of dysfunction. Growing up in Encino, the nucleus of “nice, Jewish neighborhoods”, sealing problems tightly into zip-lock baggies
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was a way of life — as if the problems were playbills from old school musicals, third grade basketball trophies, or miniature homemade menorahs. Like the ordinary and the humdrum, real world issues were crammed into cabinets and containers, jammed into dressers and drawers. Anything that dared to destroy our facade of flawlessness was forbidden territory. So when my mom’s disease took an unexpected hold last winter, my older sister and I were forced to venture outside of our narrowed Los Angeles bubble. Our world of overprotective valley moms, Sunday gossip over Western Bagel, and socioeconomic status as the key to well-being disintegrated. Suddenly there was no one to shield us from the harsh and jarring outer edges of the universe. No dark closets, no escape routes, no places to hide. In a city that is infamous for superficiality and material wealth, it is heresy to turn on the lights. With denial as the main coping mechanism in our town, I thought I would be condemned for confronting something as weighty and real as Cancer. I imagined my world would completely crumble. But when I turned the lights on here’s what I found: Having a sick parent was no doubt lonely. I searched for traces of maternal love in the faces of my grandmother, my therapist, the kind clerk at the Westwood supermarket. But I found love in the nooks and crannies I least expected — I bonded with the seventh floor UCLA lab secretary, the assistant oncologist, the nursing school students.
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// Garrett Seamans
People were understanding and kind.
tivity, laughter, smiles.
Having a sick parent meant being a parent to your own parent.
Between IV bag swaps and bone marrow biopsies, my mom, my sister, and I judged wild women on The Bachelor and rooted for USC in the Rose Bowl.
As I fetched my mom food or carefully questioned her doctors, I felt the constant care, worry, and exhaustion of motherly love. But as I waited for her to fall asleep, I discovered a deep respect for the trials and tribulations of parenthood. Above all, having a sick parent was scary. My mom had been my source of light in all my bleakest moments. When my parents’ marriage was tearing at the seams, we ate Raisinettes and found comfort together. When my teenage heart was tossed around by Los Angeles’s number one private school playboy, we made a dart-board out of a picture of his face. When I went through an emergency stomach surgery, she snuck a puppy into Tarzana hospital. She had taught me that laughter can be the best medicine, smiling the grandest cure. It was incredibly unsettling to see my source of strength so vulnerable. Without my mother igniting the light in me, I felt my entire electric grid shut down. But when I faced the reality of the situation, I was able to not only accept my mother’s vulnerability but also emulate what I had seen her do — spread posi-
After about a month, my mother was able to return home due to modern medicine and a team of superb UCLA doctors. When I entered my mother’s room that odd December morning it was dark. Everything in me told me to keep the lights off and bolt. All I knew was my role as overprotected child in my cloistered LA neighborhood. But stumbling around in the dark wasn’t going to cut it. Even in this city of constructed brands and artificial images, at some point we must turn on the lights to the unfiltered realities of life — death, divorce, disease. No matter how jarred we may feel at first, I think that we learn to navigate even the darkest of rooms. With kind eyes and a radiating warmth, my mother has taught me that lightheartedness and compassion are some of the most powerful tools at our disposal. Even in the most fortunate of circumstances, in the nicest neighborhoods, life tosses some curveballs. But perhaps when we find ourselves in a room full of darkness we can not only brave the darker realities, but make it our business to provide some natural light.
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Photography and Tattoo: a living documentation
Laurie Franck Q: Can you talk about how you first became interested in being a tattoo artist? Laurie: I met Paolo Bosson, a tattoo artist, three years ago. We wanted to get something from each other while we were on holiday, as a memory. They were some small patterns from Miro’s work, and we had only needles and ink, so he taught me how to do handpoke tattoo. Then, I started to draw again, and some friends asked me for tattoos. It just kind of continued from there. Q: You also do a bit of photography. How do you see photography and tattooing as art forms overlapping? Or, do you see them as completely separate entities? Laurie: Yes, first I’m a photographer. I worked for brands and magazines, then the tattooing came. On Instagram, I post drawings and tattoos more, but I still do photography. For me, everything is connected. It’s the
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same subject with a different medium, and they are complementary. It’s like a loop. Photography brings forms, and forms bring designs for tattoos. Q: Are all the tattoos you do hand poke tattoos? What draws you to this process rather than other tattooing techniques?
Laurie: Yes, all the tattoos are handpoke. I did my first tattoo with this technique, and I fell in love with it. I think it fits my personality. It’s kind of a meditation— it brings something different in the atmosphere, in the connection with your customer. There is no machine between you and them, no noise, it calms you down. Also, I like it because it’s not perfect, and imperfections gives life to my designs. I realized this when I tried with the machine. I was so disappointed by the result from the machine that I never gave it an other try. Q: Your work has a very minimalistic and fluid style. The figures in your pieces seem to complete themselves almost, the lines giving just enough information for the viewer’s mind to complete the picture. How did your style develop?
Laurie: I think at the beginning I was not able to draw as well as I wanted, and this lake turned into a force. So, I just keep on going and drew more and more with bodies as a main subject. Q: Do you have any artists or people who have influenced your style? Laurie: Most of my influences comes from photography: pictures I see on the internet, Instagram, weird body positions. But, sure there are some artists I really like. Paolo Bosson is one because he works with decomplexion and poetry. I also have a big crush on @kim_mick_hee, a Seoul based tattoo artist, and Kyle England from NYC. Q: How does the permanence of a tattoo affect the relationship between the subject and the art piece? I guess versus having a photograph or painting in your house that you can move or change. Laurie: It’s different, for sure. I guess when you get a piece from someone there is an exchange of energy. You give a bit of yourself to your customer, but the opposite is also true. They give something to you. So, if the moment you spend with this person is nice and deep, or not even deep but true, they won’t just wear a piece of you, but they will also carry a bit of
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your soul. It’s not easy to explain with words, I hope this is understandable. Q: Your art is being spread around the world through the people who get it tattooed on their bodies. Instead of someone coming in with a tattoo idea they want, they’re receiving a piece of your art. What are your thoughts on this? Is there something more special or different about tattooing your own art versus an idea from someone else?
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Laurie: When you tattoo a design made by someone else, the people ask for your knowledge, not for your creativity. It’s a different approach. They will judge the result but not the design because it’s not yours, so it can be comfortable sometimes. When you tattoo your design, you engage your being. It’s another level of expectations— personal expectations— because your designs reflect a part of you. You expose yourself on someone’s skin. It’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.
But, it’s definitely something powerful to let a part of you be on someone. Q: How collaborative is the design process of your tattoos with the people getting them? Laurie: Usually, I draw a lot, to give a lot of choice to my customers when they look through my portfolio. It’s rare for people to come with an idea, so I draw, propose different options, and then I tattoo. Q: You travel often, spending weeks in places across the globe. Is this travel driven by the demand for you to give tattoos in these places? Or, are you travelling out of your own interests and find places to give tattoos while you’re there? Laurie: It depends. Sometimes, I choose a destination because a lot of people from the same city are requesting a tattoo from me. Sometimes, I just want to go somewhere, so I plan the trip and then I try to see if people are interested to get tattooed. Q: What themes are you addressing in your work? Your art often contains single figures or sometimes multiple people. To me, I get a sense of the grace of the female body. Additionally, many of your pieces have a sort of intertwining of subjects making me think of intimacy and connectedness. Could you elaborate on the motivations for your works and themes? Laurie: I would consider more my work as a tribute to the female body and by extension as a tribute to love. I’m inbtwn. — 17
fascinated by bodies, female bodies first because it’s the conductive wire in my work as a photographer. I started by taking pictures of my friends, and then this fascination stayed. Bodies are interesting because they can be simple lines but the relationships are a lot more complex. It’s beautiful. I like this contrast between drawing and life. And as you said my work is about intimacy and connection between people. But, there’s no speech about feminism in my work. I know it’s in the air at the moment, but I don’t like how aggressive this movement can be. I’m for equality between men and women— I like being a woman— but I think what is happening now is definitely bad for our relation with men. I don’t want my work to be seen as a banner for the feminists. Vulnerability is beautiful, and as women we know how to use it. I understand the fight, but I don’t want to be part of it. Fighting for me is like giving force to this situation, it doesn’t bring something positive. I’m not denying the fact that there is something wrong in our society, I just think we should be more connected to each other than dig a hole of incomprehension and anger. So, I connect bodies, lines, and then you see what you want in my drawings. If it can help women to feel powerful and comfortable with their body I’m happy, and if men find a part of their feminity in my tattoos, I’m also happy. Q: How can tattoos serve as an extension of identity — either the artist’s or the subject’s? Laurie: Tattoos for me are connected to memories. It’s like a diary of your life. But there are different approaches, I guess. Tat-
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toos can give you power and protection, among other things. In every case, it’s for sure an extension of identity. Q: How has this art form allowed you to grow as a person? What have you learned about yourself and/or others since you started? Laurie: I’ve learned many things through tattooing, including patience and how to deal with people and feelings. While you’re tattooing, you enter into a really private zone. You can have this also when you take pictures, but it’s so far from what you feel when you tattoo someone. In tattooing, you work with skin and blood— it’s really primal, intimidating sometimes. It’s a lot of pressure. But, the most important thing for me was to realize that you never fully know the person under your needle.
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Growing up, my mom always called me a tornado. A lone sock, divorced from its pair and left beside the couch. An empty cup of tea with only a subtle residue of honey at the bottom, becoming a semipermanent adornment on my desk. She’d say, “I always know where in the house you’ve been by the destruction you’ve left behind”. My unintentional trace.
External Self-Portraiture
And so, I began to think about how these elements of my life could serve as something beyond a record of where I’d been. Instead, how they act as a reflection of myself potentially more encompassing of my identity than the face I see in the mirror.
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// Taylor Seamans
These photos are a sparse curation of my interactions with my world. My pillow (background), the shore rushing towards me (bottom left), my backyard view (top right), and some of my sweats thrown on my bed (bottom right). I find that identity is often discussed as the things that are “a piece of us”— suggesting we have some possession or ownership of these elements. Instead, with
these photographs I consider how I have navigated these spaces and become integrated within them. This documentation suspends slices of me in time. My identity is constantly evolving, the photos becoming outdated versions of myself maybe just briefly after they’re shot. But, while I always am changing, my unintentional trace remains captured here.
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35mm // Taylor Seamans
A rt i s
not y o u .
th
thin g
hat are st
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y g oursel n i e e f in
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artist insight Dana Journey “Nostalgia is something I have a hard time comprehending. I tend to reject looking back on moments of my life where everything was perfect and beautiful because I do not want to risk realizing those moments don’t last forever. Capturing these memories through art allows me to never forget these special occasions and helps me analyze what really makes nostalgic moments special.”
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Ornament, Adornment, The Body Lauren Kalman
Q: Can you describe the mediums you work with? Lauren: My work is generally framed within the jewelry and metalsmithing field. Over the years, my work has transitioned from jewelry as the format of my work to adornment as the subject of my work. This has freed me to approach jewelry through a variety of methods ranging from traditionally fabricated metal objects to textiles, beading, ceramics, installation, 3D printing, and computer controlled objects. Q: Your work seems to be a commentary on the expectations placed on women by society, how they might navigate/resist/respond to these. What specifically, whether it be institutional pressures or ideas at the level of individuals, are you addressing? Lauren: I think that because jewelry is worn on the body there is a link between adornment and politics of the body and that dealing with the history of jewelry and the crafts can be a political tactic.
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“But if the Crime is Beautiful…” is the title of an ongoing body of work I began in 2014, but it has also become a central question in my work. What is sanctioned and what can be beautiful, in spite of being outside, or a crime against to established value systems. I use assertive and powerful performances of the female body as a disruption to the established order of the built environment, the male Eurocentric history of art and design, and social structures that dictate norms for the body. Minimalism, intellectual purity, health, industry, and white male privilege are linked historically, and that link was codified aesthetically throughout the Modernist period. Craft is a medium that has progressed outside of the contemporary art world. The legacy of modernism, minimalism, and the high arts (sculpture and painting) have historically privileged the cerebral over the corporeal. Where craft has celebrated to body through wear-
ing, touch, and consumption. Crafts, in contrast to high art, have long been associated with the domestic, collective, and female. As my work deals largely with the female body, it calls upon historical associations with craft and the body, the senses, the erotic, decadent, and feminine in ways that challenge the status quo. Q: I am really intrigued by your series “Devices for Filling a Void.” Can you speak a bit on your inspiration for these works and the message you’re wanting to express through them? Lauren: In the body of work, “Devices for Filling a Void”, I combine jewelry forms with forms of reconstructive surgical devices. In this case, rather than coaxing the face into an ideal position, they distort the face through expanding the nostrils and holding the mouth open. The objects literally fill the void and orifices, but the title also implies a
psychological filling of emotional or erotic voids. The title points to ideas about women being incomplete or lacking, requiring augmentation by men, offspring objects, dress, makeup and adornment. Q: A lot of your work centers around the idea of prosthetics. This is seen in “Devices for Filling a Void,” “Bloom,” and others. Yet unlike the conventional (or maybe medical) use of prosthetics, to restore or extend function, your pieces seem to be more accessory/ adornment. The prosthetics have a very cosmetic and feminine element to them. How did this style develop and how does it extend your ideas? Lauren: This work comments on expectations of female beauty and politeness. I think about Baudelaire and his historic essay “In Praise of Cosmetics”, where he argues that morality is artificial, and the artificial state is what elevates humans from the natural world. Artificial beauty, obtained through altering the body, signals social participation through
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civilized morality. For example, to cover blemishes with makeup spares the eyes of our fellow citizens from the impurity of the natural body, especially when bodily decay was historically equated with moral imperfection. In this way, the pursuit of artificial beauty becomes a social obligation to maintain a common state of constructed morality. This act of mastering the body to achieve an aesthetic end reflects larger social values of mind over matter and the superiority of culture over nature. “Devices for Filling a Void” uses transformational objects that are a hybrid of jewelry and reconstructive surgical devices to signify the individual’s strive for control of the body and desires. In my work, these values and aspirations of the ideal over the natural become blurred, or are even outright protested, because the objects themselves produce disfigurement. The objects are also beau-
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tiful, making them a hybrid of the ideal and the grotesque with poses derived from representations of religious ecstasy (a state that is simultaneously tortured and orgasmic). The historically constructed ideal is an amalgam of fabricated qualities, a fiction. The ideal’s corollary, the grotesque, reminds us that all bodies have imperfections. By releasing the physical reality of the body, and framing it through the lens of adornment, my work is intended to provide an alternative to constructed ideals.
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Q: In what way do you think your work is best experienced? Photo, video, in-person, through performance? Lauren: My work is generally a combination of photographs, video, objects, and installation. It greatly depends on the work which format works best. Q: Are there other artists or people who inspire your work, how so? Lauren: I look to other artists work for reasons that range from form, to medium, to concept. Some include: Hannah Wilke, Zhang Huan, Nick Cave, Studio Job, Matthew Barney, and Guillermo Gomez Pena, and along the way there have been many more. I also am interested in historic and contemporary texts. For example, my project “But if the Crime is Beautiful…” is derived from the title of the Viennese architects Adolf Loos’ 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime, a precursor to Modernism. Ornament and Crime is both an aesthetic doctrine and also a racist and sexist proclamation. In Ornament and Crime, he proposes that ornament is regressive and primitive, and that in (his) contemporary society only degenerates, criminals are decorated, this includes women and people of color. Loos’ writings influenced principals of the Modernist movement, a lineage that still has great impact on art and design today.
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35mm // Christopher Chou
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35mm // Christopher Chou
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