Alumni Profile
Lauren Adams
Class of 2007: MFA| Homepage | http://lfadams.com/ |
Bio
Lauren is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to her appointment she taught painting as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon and Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA.
I believe that art can disrupt order and provide new models for the individual and society. As Bruce Nauman once said, “Art is a means of acquiring an investigative attitude.” In Bread & Bullets, a recent room-sized installation that takes on the form of a contemporary American dining room, I attempt to do just that. I am interested in the intersection of contemporary global reality with an often idealized American past. I am particularly interested in the concept of decorative patterns as visual background noise; as something we see all the time but rarely comment upon.
I find inspiration in the form and function of Russian Revolutionary political propaganda textiles and colonial American textile patterns, which historically have featured wars and political happenings and served as a record of contemporary lifestyles. For instance, the Russian grange pattern from the 1920’s (which typically featured pastoral vistas of noble peasant workers sowing and harvesting their land, surrounded by the literal fruits of their labor) has been transformed into a contemporary and accurate North Carolina grange scene of Hispanic migrant labor harvesting fruits of a land they neither own nor will own, the backdrop vista of trailers for homes and school buses for transportation, and typical Latin American ethnic fruits and vegetables (now commonly found on N.C. supermarket shelves) as the frame for this scene.
The French toile pattern is a visual trope I use often, most recently in a pattern I call Baghdad Blasts at Assassin�s Gate, where car bombs share space with wounded bodies (source imagery relating to a specific day in October 2004 when a car exploded in Baghdad), taking the place of the bugle boys and frolicking maidens of traditional toile patterns.
Much of my work from the past few months of 2005 has expanded into other decorative domestic objects, like commemorative ceramic plates. One recent project has focused on imagining the presence of military objects in maneuvers over regional landmarks of my home state, North Carolina. The featured images are of an Osprey plane flying over the Governor�s Mansion in Raleigh, and the Active Denial System (a particularly insidious riot control device) parked in front of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on the Outer Banks. Utilizing the ceramic plate as a commemorative device for things that have not happened (but could), I attempt to realize the current levels of terror threats and make visual the very real military society that we live in.
I am creating a new kind of visual propaganda, by investigating past uses of visual patterning (specifically, the use of these patterns as political displays of power, struggle, and social subversion). I hope that the juxtapositions of different realities that I present will cause my audience to think differently about their own lives: their work, their relationships to other working classes, to American foreign policy and finally, within their own homes as they interact with friends and families.
