Lauren Michelle Peterson

Region: West

City / State: Chestertown, MD

 I use devalued objects such as used furniture, discarded housewares, and packaging as painterly marks to build abstract compositions. Considering material properties and limitations, I negate the objects’ use-function in favor of its aesthetic capacities. This reordering of objects challenges the normative hierarchy of value and rejects objects as symbols. My primary motivation in the studio is play and humorous experimentation. I find perfection laughable and instead allow my forms to succumb to mistakes of my own hand and the inclinations of their materials. My assemblages are awkward or exaggerated mutations of familiar forms turned abject. These forms are components, able to be rearranged within an installation, stand alone, or be taken apart and repurposed, denying the idea of objective conclusion.

My recent work focuses on expectation and disappointment. I consider the absurdity in domestic rituals that strive for an ideal. Subverting the spectacle of decoration, I push the seductively beautiful towards the overwhelmingly sickening. My interest lies within the slippery demarcation between useful and useless, appealing and repellent.