Exhibitions

Jovian Resonance: gallery views /  by Laura J. Lawson

Detail from A breakthrough (Europa)

Detail from Magnetic dynamo (Ganymede)

Detail from The patient historian (Callisto)

Detail from Jupiter’s beating heart (Io)

Works from this exhibition are available to purchase through Ro2 Art Gallery at www.artsy.net/artist/laura-j-lawson

Elements of Place: gallery views /  by Laura J. Lawson

Elements of Place was on view at the Dennis Gallery at Austin College in Sherman, Texas from October 9th - December 8th, 2017.

Austin College press release

The Austin College Art and Art History Department will host the exhibit “Laura J. Lawson: Elements of Place” now to December 8 in the Dennis Gallery of the Forster Art Complex, 1313 N. Richards Street, Sherman. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For additional information, call the Art and Art History Department at 903.813.2048. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Lawson lived all over Texas growing up and frequent family road trips fueled her love of exploration. While earning a bachelor’s degree from Austin College, her studies took her to Scotland, China, France, Peru, and Ecuador, and she traveled to New Orleans and Chicago after graduation. She earned her MFA from the University of Memphis and spent two months in residency at the Centre d’Art Marnay Art Center (CAMAC) in France. She has since returned to Dallas.

Her residency on the banks of the Seine in Marnay-sur-Seine helped Lawson explore ways of thinking about place. Though nearly 5,000 miles away, the area sometimes reminded her of American towns she knew, including Sherman. Rather than create works about the people and cultures of the places, she was compelled to investigate the physical landscapes, which existed before the places were ever settled. The places are examined in her exhibit through a satellite view, an atmospheric view, and a navigational view.

The satellite-view paintings explore how land and water shape the landscape and form significant relationships for these regions: the Seine is a major artery for France, and the Red River feeds the Mississippi watershed. The atmospheric paintings investigate Lawson’s personal observations of being present in the place. The colors and patterns tie directly to light, water, soil, building materials, wildlife, and other elements that make the area what it is. The navigational view uses regional maps that Lawson has cut into miniature webs of roads. These sculptural drawings highlight years of human effort to make these regions both navigable and livable.

“Ultimately, the physical elements that make up Sherman and Marnay-sur-Seine are the seeds from which their people grew,” Lawson said. “Cultural ways of living can (and should!) cross borders, but the landscape itself can never be truly replicated.”

 

Photography by Mary Cyrus Photography.

Depaysement: gallery views /  by Laura J. Lawson

Dépaysement was on view at the Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at The University of Memphis from October 21st - November 4th, 2016. 

The University of Memphis press release

Dépaysement is the MFA thesis exhibition featuring the work of Laura J. Lawson. Dépaysement, a French word with no direct English translation, describes the feeling of being out of one's home country. The exhibition addresses her three years in Memphis contrasted with her recent artist residency in Marnay-sur-Seine, France.

Lawson's paintings are made with ink on translucent plastic. The result resembles cartographic endeavors, separating the viewer from each place with an aerial perspective. Her two largest works layer these paintings in front of cut paper maps in a grid formation, creating shadows of highways beneath the landscape-like surface. In other works, Lawson has drawn directly on the painting to mix the universal qualities of topography with the arbitrary shapes of borders and roads. The color palettes of all of these paintings are specifically derived from either Memphis or Marnay-sur-Seine, but the characteristics of these places become lost in the similar and strange elements of geography.

 

Photography by Katherine Stanley Photography.

More notes by the artist on Depaysement

The exhibition was the product of my experiences after three years of study in Memphis, and a two month artist residency at the Centre d'Art Marnay Art Center (CAMAC) in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. I wanted to take a deep look at the concept of the identity of place, and I did so by investigating the landscape through color, pathways, borders, and cartography.

As an undergraduate, I spent a semester in Paris, and gained what I'll call an academic fluency with the French language. (Fluent enough, but not confidently bilingual.) My favorite words to learn were the ones that didn't have an English equivalent. Depaysement. The feeling of not being in one's home country. What is that, exactly?

The odd thing is, by returning to France for the CAMAC residency, I was essentially returning to something familiar. I spoke the language, navigating nearby Paris was already easy for me, and there were few surprises left when it came to cultural differences. Still, the light and air were different, and invisible particles seemed energized in different wavelengths. Time ran at a slightly different speed. Even on days when I felt terrible, I could still delight in how normalcy was never quite normal.

The depaysement in the French countryside reminded me of the almost imperceptible differences that continued to permeate my life in Memphis. Despite moving frequently, most of my youth was spent in Texas. Southern culture covers a huge swath of states, but despite a shared love of BBQ and sno-cones, there were still peripheral and atmospheric qualities that would never be identical.

I really saturated my mind and body in these places. They were a little familiar, a little strange, and had more in common than I could have predicted. It's invigorating to be depaysee, and these questions and memories continue to drive my artistic practice.