Vacillating between cursed objects and fragmented subjects, the figures populating Lauren Satlowski’s Amateurs of Time, Epicures of Duration are hellbent on unmooring the signifying process. Otherwise references—drafts, models, studies, sketches—compose self-aware pseudo-subjects in undetermined states. Enacting various temperaments of work’s daily grind, the deconstructed prototypes fall from a status of inspiration, as banality, absurdity, and anxiety set in. Whether rendered on transparencies or flipped to reveal an unruly verso, Satlowski’s semi-ambiguous characters lay their construction bare, not only exposing the conditions of their creation but reveling in their drift between familiar and strange.
As the unstable surrogates face their voids, their partial selves continue to unravel. Subjecthood is further negotiated in obscuring their faces—transforming sites meant to be 'read' into territories of alienation where the self becomes othered. This subject/object rift reveals a hidden necessity for the unknowable in everyday awareness—an unawareness crucial to psychic survival. Stark contrasts of light and shadow underscore this notion, providing contour and form to an otherwise inundation of fully illuminated consciousness.
Composed with sculptural sensibility, skulls, dolls, and sketches of amorphic faces test the plasticity of being. Moments of misrecognition open signifiers to interpretation, rousing curiosity by eschewing the closed loop of resolved meaning. Taped to a wall, a baggie zipped full of water recreates the infamous age illusion, ‘my wife and my mother-in-law’. Stimulating the modularity of perception and identity, we catch glimpses of our own affects—assigning the plastic bag and permanent marker with a complex interior life. As parched and viscous residues inflect objects with glossy clarity and matte aridity inturn, the surfaces diverge more than guide.
Operating under the concept of what Svetlana Boym describes as "reflective nostalgia," the characters presuppose an inevitable distortion of the past as viewed through the present. In this vein, they embody the duality of reflective nostalgia; the seduction of illusion paired with disillusionment, home coupled with displacement, a romantic fantasy of reunion combined with an underlying sense of longing. Marked by irony, humor, and inconclusiveness, they open the past to new potentialities. Replacing any notation of origin with more pastiche, the subjects ignore traditional measurements of time, freely luxuriating in their own temporal textures.
In Amateurs of Time, Epicures of Duration, pace is an ever-present specter. Interrogating forces that warp time’s passage, the impulse of a sketch grinds against meticulous rendering of paint. The protagonists fixate on their own realization, ruminating on the speed of an idea in space. Daily efforts transform immediate streams of consciousness into something slow and deliberate. As a force accelerates and halts throughout the exhibition, inertia collapses into static vastness, suspending figures in deep, uncertain space. Caught between being and non-being, the proxies confront temporality and the many moods that compose one’s own mortal coil.
Lauren Satlowski lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2013) and a BFA from Wayne State University (2009). Her work has been exhibited internationally throughout Europe, Asia and the United States, most recently in the group exhibitions Mad Monk at Micki Meng, New York; Present 23 at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; When The Sun Loses Its Light at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Satlowski has held solo exhibitions at Office Baroque in Antwerp; Bel Ami, DM Office, Paris, and ODD ARK in Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ICA Miami, and the Columbus Museum of Art.
