Lauren Ball: The Village of The Mind
November 5, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Opening Reception, Saturday, November 5, 2022
6 - 9PM
Jackson Pollock (At Work On One Of His Large Canvases), ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 9”, 2022.
The Village Of The Mind, by New York-based artist Lauren Ball (b.1980, Chicago, IL), is a series of works on paper that explores single-plane abstraction, dimensionality, color, and memory. These artworks often mimic the phenomenon of religious paintings, such as Madonna and Child (ca.1325) by Ugolino da Siena, in that they affirm faith via a static and graphic image. Ball investigates drawing and painting through the still image using artist monographs and printed dictionary illustrations as anagrams and generic reinventions of recognizable cues of both painting and Americana. These recent works impress Ball’s fascination with memory, objects, words, and the hierarchical visual systems that might create meaning. The images are cannibalized and reinvented, and this connotation often reveals a curious and inspiring opening of subjects. The dictionary imagery appears connected, conflated, and memorialized - the adjoining of illustrated words into visual totems and vistas does not illuminate missing information, yet there exists beauty. Ball cites influences such as Giorgio de Chirico, Mike Kelley, Andy Warhol, and Richard Tuttle as points of entry into the motifs of reconstruction, stillness, and the play on the original. The Village Of The Mind series incorporates modes of painting, drawing, and image-making that Ball has explored for over a decade, and they are interchangeable as both source and output, with drawing acting as a diagrammatic means to arrange a sociable space of imagery.