lauren peterson
  • home
  • installation + sculpture
    • It's my party and I'll cry if I want to
    • This is why we can't have nice things
    • One sandwich shy of a picnic
    • Personal Landscape Maintenance
    • Altar (egg casseroles and hand towels)
    • Altar (interior balloons)
    • Other Domestic Idioms
  • on paper
  • ARCHIVE
    • video + performance
    • on Going
    • An Archive of Recategorization
    • One Hour Landmarks
    • on Remaining
  • curatorial
  • about
  • student work

ARTIST STATEMENT

​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 reference domestic rituals of maintenance and use decoration to the extreme seeking the point at which the seductively beautiful becomes overwhelmingly sickening. My sewn, stuffed, wrapped, and painted assemblages are mutations of familiar domestic 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. 

I find absurdity in striving for perfection and instead allow my forms to succumb to gravity, mistakes of my own hand, and the inclinations of their materials. I use humor, awkwardness, and exaggerations 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 a way for me to nullify gender and social expectations 
© COPYRIGHT 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • home
  • installation + sculpture
    • It's my party and I'll cry if I want to
    • This is why we can't have nice things
    • One sandwich shy of a picnic
    • Personal Landscape Maintenance
    • Altar (egg casseroles and hand towels)
    • Altar (interior balloons)
    • Other Domestic Idioms
  • on paper
  • ARCHIVE
    • video + performance
    • on Going
    • An Archive of Recategorization
    • One Hour Landmarks
    • on Remaining
  • curatorial
  • about
  • student work