RAIR | 2021-22

Lauren Clay

Lauren Clay, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, came to Roswell from New York. She received a MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007, and BFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art in 2004. 

Clay has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “Persephone” at Bosse & Baum gallery, London, and “While Sleeping, Watch” at Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas. In 2019 she created a collaborative installation with Peter Halley titled “QUBE” which was exhibited at Gallery Kula in Split, Croatia. In 2019, her site-specific installation Cenotaph was included in Peter Halley’s solo project, “Heterotopia I” in Venice, Italy, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale.

Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Artsy, and the Washington Post. Clay was a 2019 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and a 2020 recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Her editioned artist book, Subtle Body, is included in the artist book collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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These sculptures and installations form at the threshold of the unconscious mind, dreams, and hallucinatory experiences to form an uncanny world that references Modernist painting, Baroque architecture, 1970s utopian design, and ancient Greek sculpture. Within the relief sculptures, space is compressed and distorted through forced-perspective carvings of doorways, stairs and windows, and enhanced with hand-painted marble and shadows. Ornate latticework is embedded in narrow windows, while rolling, repeating limbs symmetrically twist inward and outward around twin arches. These isolated architectural forms imply an attempt to anchor one’s self to a location. Although physically disorienting, an alternate system of navigation emerges from art-historical fragments and symbols, such as sculpted tendrils of hair, vines and fabric.

The sculptures are hand-made constructions of paper pulp, plaster, resin, epoxy clay, and modeling paste. Each sculpture is finished and hand-painted with oil paint.

The sculptures are often exhibited within an installation of digitally printed wallpaper which transforms the room of the gallery into a DeChiroco-esque landscape which warps and manipulates the otherwise flat walls. The digitally printed wallpaper is made from scanned and enlarged collages of hand-marbled paper. This dramatically scaled enlargement of the collage, creates a trompe-l’oeil effect. The illusion created by the printed enlargement of layered paper, causes the walls to feel sculpted, soft and textured in a way similar to the sculptures, further confusing the viewer’s perception of real and illusionary space.

To see more of this artist’s work: www.laurenclay.com

Roswell Museum

Rair exhibition • Lauren Clay “Phantom Stair” •September 10 - October 23, 2022

Below, a short video about Lauren Clay and her exhibition Phantom Stair, at the Roswell Museum.