Unnoosed and Straight
Lauren Davis
Curated by Kate Eringer
Opening reception Thursday January 25, 2018, 8-11pm
January 25 – February 28, 2018
“The flower is the most conspicuous part of the plant. Their appeal has encouraged Man to know and possess them. (…) But flowers have not been produced by plants for man’s sake.”
– entry from botanical online journal
SADE is pleased to present Lauren Davis, in the project room. This is the first Los Angeles exhibition for Norway based, American born, Lauren Davis. Unnoosed and Straight offers her ironic work, whose pieces are anything but “straight”. Each work is gnarled and requests the viewers’ active participation to piece apart.
Using organic form, the porcelain ceramics physically embody both the legacy of textile and the material human form; guts and organs and organs and guts. Unsure whether they are soft as tissue or hard as rock. In fact they are something and nothing of both, glazed porcelain cast over wet textile, hard to the touch and delicate to breakage. These are the binaries littered in Lauren Davis’s “Unnoosed and Straight”.
The digital collages are female forms existing within floral confinements. Far from breaking out of this floral identity, the (once again) dismembered figures, a forearm or leg, peacefully rests in its position. The ‘delicate’ flower motif is rendered clinical with its technical references and framing alluding to botanical science.
The ceramics appearing soft to the touch is likely due to their close visual similarities to textile. Upon first viewing, these could be cloth; wet and dyed, wrung and left to bleed out. Textile and cloth work have, historically, been left to women, questioning the nature of “women’s work”. With regards to the highly political and flawed nature of the manufacturing industry as well as a nod to the art history that omitted so many female artists in lieu of their prescribed household duties, Lauren Davis stays within the art historical confinements as a “woman artist” and simultaneously offers critique from within.
Human form as inanimate object is considered here, a delicate dismembered body object. Inanimacy suggests lack of voice and inability to create change. This work welcomes a US context, where the artist originates, and ruminates on a political dynamic where so many voices and autonomy are being challenged.
Lauren Davis (b. 1992) is an American artist living and working in Oslo, Norway. Lauren received her BFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2014 and her MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2017. Her work has been included at Galleri Seilduken II, Oslo Ø, Melk Galleri, KHiO, Kunstnerneshus, Oslo, Norway and Sheila E. Jonson Design Center, New York, NY. She was nominated for 2017 BKH Photographic Award.
