My interview discussing my current solo show Vestiges:

http://perfectlaughter.com/index.php/lauren-rice-interview/

Vestiges: New Work by Lauren Rice

org contemporary is pleased to present: Vestiges: New Work by Lauren Rice

Opening Reception December 11th, 7:00-9:00 pm

Special Exhibition Preview December 5th during Noel Night and the Russell Industrial Open Studios


Using both collage and installation, Lauren Rice transforms ordinary materials into curious forms. Her recent works on paper combine collaged magazine elements, ink, graphite, gouache, spray paint and paper pulp to create abstractions that exist in the liminal space between sexy and strange, pretty and gross.

In Rice’s installations and sculptural projects, she accumulates, modifies, and arranges found and created objects. Using the gallery space as a jumping off point from which to grow and expand in mysterious ways, her installations also balance in between awkward and elegant.

Rice’s work simultaneously supports and subverts expectations of formal qualities and structural integrity; utilitarian and decorative function. By doing so, she investigates techniques and materials that have masculine and feminine connotations, as well as explores notions of craft, kitsch, preciousness and sentimentality.

Rice’s work clearly expresses an interest in contributing to the current dialogue of using found, non-traditional material to create work. It is essential to her practice, however, to criticize and challenge those very tactics by intentionally overindulging in formal elements that have become trends in contemporary art. Precious forms exist beautifully next to awkward, even ugly shapes. Elegant cut paper flowers emerge from a slop of paper pulp or cement. Trendy rays of color radiate from blobs of collage, drawing attention to the relationship between the gawky, strange and the formally divine.

Lauren Rice was born in Atlanta, GA and currently lives and works in Detroit, MI. She received her BA in Studio Art from Knox College and her MFA in Painting from American University in Washington, DC. Recently, her work has been curated into exhibitions such as Paper Trail: Selections from Transformer Gallery's Flat Files at both Transformer Gallery and Heineman Myers Contemporary Art; Girlish Ways: The Next Generation of Female Artists at The Bobby Fisher Memorial Building in Washington, DC; and Experimental Drawing at Nance Street Studios in Houston, TX. Lauren has exhibited in venues in New York City, Chicago, Houston, Fort Worth, Washington DC, Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta.

org contemporary specializes in solo or two person exhibitions of local and national contemporary artists. They are located on the third floor of building 2 at the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit, MI.


http://www.orgcontemporary.com
http://lauren-rice.com/