Lauren Pearce American, b. 1988

Overview
Lauren Pearce
Where You Go I Go, 2022
Lauren Pearce’s paintings are the vibrant manifestations of her interior self. They are the results of a cathartic journey of intimate self reflection. Pearce delves deeply into the complexities and nuances of self discovery, affirmation, and intimacy. Specifically, she is exploring how different formats of intimacy are constructed (or reconstructed) as an adult at the precipice of a new phase in life. The way she refers to the process of making this series is as an ‘unfolding’. It is a way of creating artwork that runs parallel to a conscientious un/re-learning. The intimate areas that Pearce is investigating are personal, but also universally understandable. There is an emotionally transgressive aspect of what she is exploring that seeps out of each canvas and envelops the viewer. It is the large and seductive monochromatic backgrounds, which have become a telltale characteristic in Pearce’s practice, that draw the viewer in.
 
The deep and flat backdrops are simultaneously expansive- even infinite- and constrained. The viewer is both voyeur and participant in a space without parameters. Figures adorned in geometrically patterned fabrics (another staple in Pearce’s figurative painting practice) bloom seamlessly from similar hues. In Letting go with you was easy, a couple clad in nectarine-and-flamingo polkadots and summer-tomato emerge from a tangerine plane. Locked in a frontal embrace that reads as both romantic and protective, the duo look out at the viewer from their orange arena. Neither of their visages betray a sense of circumstance or purpose.

 

- Extract from text by Jasmine Wahi

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Biography
Lauren Pearce

Lauren Pearce (b. 1988) is multi-media artist who lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Heroutput ranges from complex free hand drawings of varying sizes to outsized outdoor muralsexecuted in vibrant colours. Also adept at portraiture, her versatility is reflected in the variedsizes these are executed in, from smaller intimate painting to canvases measuring nine by ninefeet. Ever cognisant of how her African-Americanidentity influences her practice, the artisthas consciously tapped into her more expressive self, employing a wide range of materials,colours, and surface media in the production of her art. The free reign has resulted in a fullerexpression of her views about her Jamaican heritage, wider racial politics, feminist ideologyand motherhood. Lauren Pearce is a full-time studio artist and had recent solo exhibitions inCleveland and a very successful outing as part of Truth Be Me, a show celebrating black femalecreativity in New York.

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Where You Go I Go, 2022