Eric Firestone Gallery is happy to announce No Man’s Land, its first solo exhibition with artist Lauren dela Roche. For the present, dela Roche has made her largest work up to now, as much as 14 ft extensive. Discovered, mended, and repurposed cotton feed sacks are her surfaces—giving the work a posh tactility that corresponds to their wealthy patterning and figuration.
Lauren dela Roche is a self-described queer punk feminist whose autodidactic method integrates a broad vary of references, together with zines, European modernisms, and autobiography. Whereas largely self-taught, her consumption of visible tradition and artwork historical past permits her to attract upon lengthy traditions of artwork historical past, remixing Egon Schiele’s line drawing with the affect of transgressive cinema and Karen Finley’s efficiency artwork, Persian miniatures, Greek mythology, and folklore into her personal iconic, contemporary fashion. Rising up within the Bay Space of California and residing for intervals in each Seattle, WA, and Asheville, NC, dela Roche has resided within the Midwest since younger maturity and presently lives and works close to St. Louis, MO.
The work depict multiplying and echoing views of a nude girl, who turns into a recurring central character. She seems in dream-like environments of historic Greek archways, Matissean-patterned wall tapestries, and amongst larger-than-life butterflies, snakes, and swans. The feminine determine in dela Roche’s work is elongated, with rouged cheeks, stockings, and lengthy raven hair. Greater than representing any particular particular person, the feminine type is a multiplicitous image for dela Roche, signifying, for instance, Mom Nature.
Symmetry and mirroring is utilized to nice impact, and the work act as Rorschach checks for the viewer. The girl could be learn concurrently or alternately as sexually in management, weak, highly effective, and secure. Likewise, are the snakes symbols of hazard and sin, or do they merely weave the scene collectively as they wind by way of it? Swans could also be symbols of knowledge and love, however all through artwork historical past, they’re depictions of the violent Greek mythological story of Leda and the Swan. Lilies additionally multiply all through her work; within the Bible, they symbolize purity and innocence. There are recommendations of therapeutic: within the repeated motif of the pink bow of the stockings, linear components resembling stitches on the physique, and the mending of the feed sacks overlaid on the figures’ flesh.
Dela Roche’s work has deep ties to the land and agriculture. Her dad and mom come from households who initially immigrated in quest of farming alternatives in the US, rising potatoes within the Midwest. For almost a decade, dela Roche lived off the land in Northern Minnesota, constructing a cabin solely out of discovered supplies and turning into totally self-reliant by way of farming. Gathering and mending cotton feedsack textiles by hand earlier than making use of paint, dela Roche displays on her time working—and making artwork—throughout harvest time. Every floor is imbued along with her enduring curiosity about their distinctive agricultural histories.