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Avatars
2015
4-channel digital video
5 min excerpt of 9 min 34 sec
Avatars explores performance and objects as projections of power and desire. The video uses a vocabulary of circus or sideshow performance. It is prolonged and uncomfortable examination of the inhibited female body. The video is paired with garments, ceramic vessels, and masks. The work speaks notions of sexualized performance through the use of the nude or restrained female body. The fabric suit references a hospital gown and is quilted with the pattern for the towers of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, reflecting its utopian values of minimalism, functionality, and control. This intellectual restraint is in conflict with the physical realties of the body
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To Have or To Hold…
2022
Digital video
2 min 30 sec
To Have or To Hold… began as an intuitive response to the pandemic. The project is a meditation on building, control, and destruction. The desire to hold close. The ability to smother. To Have or to Hold… is derived from the marriage vows “…to have and to hold… until death do us part…” I produce wheel thrown ceramic vessels and blow glass vessels that I distort through holding or compressing in the negative spaces of my body. The ceramic vessels are derived from historic or archetypal vessels used to hold materials related to the body, water, food, and ashes for example. The carefully controlled form of the vessel is lost with the imprint of the body leaving both a permanent distortion of the original form and the lasting imprint of the absent body. Once the vessels are formed, they are not altered, tension cracks, folds, and textures are all fired in place.
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To Have or To Hold…
2022
Digital video. Earthenware
1 min 39 sec. 24x15x15”
This piece can be presented installed as on object or displayed as a video.
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To Hold…
2022
Glass, table, inkjet prints
Variable
To Hold… is comprised of 40 blown glass vessels, 10 inkjet prints, and poplar tables. The glass forms are embedded with the negative space of the body. Using selected blown forms, I produced performative images of the objects being held. The transparency of the glass proved to emphasize the empty space between the body parts in a way that opaque objects did not. They also provide the opportunity to see through the form to the body. When not held by the body looking through the glass allows the viewer to see the imprint body as a positive form, while looking at the surface of the glass obscures the form of the body as it is a negative indentation.
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To Hold…
2022
Inkjet print
24x16”
The glass vessels are formed using a plaster cast of the artists body to hold or hug the molten glass. A video of the process can be found here: https://www.laurenkalman.com/portfolio/tohold
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To Hold…
2022
Inkjet print
24x16”
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To Hold… (breast, belly, arm, hand)
2022
Glass
18x15x10”
8
Devices for Filling a Void
2019
Gold-plated copper, earthenware, glass, inkjet prints, mdf, stainless steel
Variable
This work is comprised of interchangeable images and objects that have been produced between 2019 and 2014. Each installation includes different sets of works. Devices for Filling a Void literally fill the voids of the body, but also implies a psychological filling of emotional or erotic voids. The works point to ideas about women being incomplete or lacking, requiring augmentation by others, objects, dress, and adornment.
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Device for Filling a Void (35)
2022
Inkjet print. Earthenware
20x16”. 48x30x30”
Devices for Filling a Void are craft-based objects (ceramic, glass, precious metal, and jewelry) used to make sculptures that interact with the body. Some of the works in this series take on an association with absent bodies, like lovers or children. The objects relationship with the body projects a feeling of being simultaneously nurturing and violent. The white, glazed ceramic is intended to share a visual vocabulary with familiar objects like toilets, sinks, and bathtubs.
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Device for Filling a Void (1)
2014
Inkjet print
20x16”
Many of the objects directly reference historic reconstructive surgery devices, but rather than coaxing the body into an ideal position they distort it through actions like expanding the nostrils and holding the mouth open.
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Device for Filling a Void (1)
2014
Gold-plated electroformed copper, sterling silver
4x4x4”
Devices for Filling a Void are fabricated from gold-plated electroformed copper, brass and silver; slip cast and hand-built ceramics; and glass that are molded to the body. These objects and then used to produce performance photographs.
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But if the Crime is Beautiful…
Strangers to the Garden
2016
Brass, found furniture, inkjet prints
~9x9x14’ and 9x9x9’ spaces
Installation of 3000 hand pressed brass leaves and images. It responds to the architect Adolf Loos’ 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime, where he proposes that ornament is regressive, primitive and that, in (his) contemporary society, only criminals and degenerates are decorated (this includes women). In this installation the decorative metal, garments, and leaves contrast the male dominated Modernist aesthetic and its utopian values of minimalism and functionality. Loos’ writings on architecture and functional art helped to define the principals of the Modern architecture and design movements. The influence of these movements permeates the contemporary built environment. The iconic furniture represents this Modernist lineage.
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But if the Crime is Beautiful…
Strangers to the Garden
2016
Brass, found furniture, inkjet prints
~9x9x14’ and 9x9x9’ spaces
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But if the Crime is Beautiful…
Strangers to the Garden
2016
Brass, found furniture, inkjet prints
~9x9x14’ and 9x9x9’ spaces
15
But if the Crime is Beautiful…
2014
Inkjet prints, mixed media
Variable
But if the Crime is Beautiful… is a multi-media project comprised of ~70 photographs, 10 wearable objects, 15 sculptures, and an installation. It is comprised of series: Composition with Ornament and Object, Hoods, Altared, Relics, Monstrance, and Strangers to the Garden.
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But if the Crime is Beautiful…
Composition with Ornament and Object (9)
2014
Inkjet print
20x16”
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Flourish (1)
2021
Digital video. Gold-plated copper and bonze
3 sec looped. 10x10x10”
Flourish is comprised of 10 videos and9 objects. In this work historic pressing dies for costume jewelry were used to produce approximately 700 copper flourishes. The decorative swoops are constructed into gold-plated sculptures that interact with the body referencing bodily fluids, like sweat, expelled during states of repulsion, pain, and joy.
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Flourish (8)
2021
Digital video. Gold-plated copper
1 sec looped. 6x6x5”
19
Virus Simulation
2013
Interactive wearable electronics, digital prints
2x2x.25” each
In collaboration with Kipp Bradford
Photo: Monica Gaspar
Virus Simulation is an interactive artwork that makes visible the hidden world of a biological virus spread by social contact. This artwork is comprised of wearable interactive electronic broaches that mimic the spread of the Human Papilloma Virus and an online visualization of that process. It creates an opportunity to simulate the spread of a contagious disease in a real population.
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Virus Simulation
2013
Interactive wearable electronics, digital prints
2x2x.25” each
In collaboration with Kipp Bradford