Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Dirty Sweep / Lauren Schaffer
I create work through the logic of the mold, with “its pleasurable and mysterious constraint”
(Marcel Duchamp). Closely observed matter, location, and sound recur throughout my work,
alluding to multiple scales of geography and time. This Toronto studio installation is a reworking
of my Halifax exhibition, Dirty Sweep. It consists of small sculptural works and field recordings in
video and audio form. Wall-mounted suites of the eponymous structures refer in part to horizonless,
photographic backdrops. They consist of white plastic sheets curving away from the walls on sloping
(just-off-level) wooden shelves. These canted cots are inspired by Soviet architect, Konstantin
Melnikov’s unrealized “sleeping laboratory” (“Green City” 1929) whose communal, technologized
sleep cure resonated and drew me to design such supports for a resulting restless collective.
These shelves will hold an updated and rotating selection of recombinant objects, designed without
singular orientation or wholeness. Other objects held in place are organic, subject to a number of
many sculptural procedures and the porousness of worlds, never “exceeding biology”
(Jen McMackon). The supports function as both rationalistic constructions and irrational yearnings.
In the separate room are related videos, including ‘Studio Series’ (2019) and recent audio work.
These are voyeuristic studies of insect and animal subjects who delineate our shared infrastructure,
exhibiting an empathic and at times, impassive gaze.
-Lauren Schaffer (January, 2022)