Making A Way | Solace
Artists: Fern T. Apfel, Laurén Brady, Daniel Kukla, Laurel Lueders, Richard Nickel, Jennifer Printz, Leviticus Shand, William Tourtillotte
Statement
Dwelling is to live in. To think, write, or speak of a place, a memory. It is a conscious lingering that is innately present and past.
My current body of work explores landscape and memory by looking at the emotional and psychological attachments placed on daily events. Themes of wandering through various environments, loneliness, solitude, and transience surface within the drips and thick swaths of paint to create and obfuscate. Charcoal and pastel carve into the surface as indelible vestiges and soft echoes of pine forests, shorelines, architecture, and cast-off objects. These mundane memories are painted with tenderness. The objects, often discarded fragments, are precious and intrinsically tied to a particular location. Their meanings are heightened in retrospect becoming place-holders for particular experiences. Within the works, imagery slips and sinks; on shelves, plants removed from the earth shrivel as a memory that fades. Color and form fragment across the painted surfaces, punctuate in moments of clarity.
Through abstraction, expressive mark-making, and layering, the paintings are intentional meditations on daily life and an attempt to understand and hold on to the liminal. The works expose shifting and moving in the present; the things in process of losing and the things that are lost. My work seeks to pause, acknowledge, and reflect on the everyday through tendency and tenderness, reverence and reverie, memory and memorabilia, storage and stories.
Bio
Laurén Brady is a visual artist living in Charlotte, Michigan. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University and a BA in Studio Art from Indiana Wesleyan University. Her work has been included in several solo, small group, and national juried exhibitions including Eastend Studio and Gallery in Marshall, Michigan; Customs House Museum in Clarksville, Tennessee; The Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; and Jackson Dinsdale Art Center at Hastings College. Laurén has been awarded artist residencies with Golden Apple Studios, The Sable Project, and La Macina di San Cresci. She was recently interviewed by Synthetic Meatball, an online curatorial platform, and has been featured in Studio Visits Magazine Volume 44, Create! Magazine, as well as numerous online art blogs. Laurén currently is working as Development Manager and Communications Coordinator at REACH Studio Art Center and also teaches in the Foundations Area at Michigan State University and Kellogg Community College.
laurenbradyart.com
Instagram: @laurenbradyart
