from March 13 to September 2 2018
"Seven Lakes Drive"
Laurie Karp
Curator of the exhibition: Claude d'Anthenaise
Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design where she discovered a multitude of media, Laurie Karp experimented with various techniques after graduation, ranging from ceramics to painting to video. Having a taste for hybridization in her forms as much as in the techniques of creation, she frequently mixes these modes of expression within the same work. Thus, interweaving various types of images, she can combine her sculptural forms with drawings or video. In the same spirit, she associates image and textile: using the traditional technique of embroidery, she creates digital images of which she applies herself to suggest the pixels with the needle. But it is to ceramics that she returns most willingly to give life to a strangely organic world. Using the richness of effect that enamel allows, she tries to evoke the diversity of textures and materials. These are often anatomical fragments, shreds or viscera, small carnal forms that seem destined for a barbaric feast. Cruelty is never far away.
(Automatically translated with Google Translate)
Playing with the attraction of techniques associated with the decorative arts, Laurie Karp sketches disconcerting scenes where men and beasts maintain ambiguous relationships. Her vision of nature is not that of an immobile and serene Eden. She rather envisages it as a kind of tragicomic theater whose actors would be animated by the desire and the hunger. Their deadly embraces, their tooth and nail struggles, she veils them under the charming appearance of ceramics or embroidery. It is in this spirit that she conceived most of the pieces created for the exhibition at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.
From a residency at the Museum of Ceramics in Desvres, a set of works in glazed earthenware declines the theme of the forest. But the theme of water is never far from his work and the organic forms covered with scales are next to condensed landscapes within installations where the artist leaves it to the observer to elucidate the plot. The liquid element is still present, but channeled this time, in a proliferating piping system from which wisteria flowers spring up. At the Manufacture de Sèvres - Cité de la céramique, Laurie Karp has also designed a set of porcelain sculptures for the painting salons of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. Using forms, decorations and techniques from the repertoire of the factory created at the initiative of the Marquise de Pompadour, she has created a falsely reassuring ensemble. She perpetuates small crimes with humor and ferocity, under the cover of a decor with rococo accents.
