STATEMENT OF WORK

Julian Schnabel thinks Lauren Faigeles has a Great Personality! 

Please do not try to verify this information. 

One painting stands tall at six feet by six feet, and some might call it square, but Lauren calls it Pussy-Assisted Suicide. A painting labored over for six years. 

Erasure, a technique that reigns supreme in her practice, is never subtractive but always additive. Her work is layered over years and years, and the painted space becomes overwhelmed with baggage. Faigeles takes a big ol’ trauma dump in the studio. She paints with her hands, obstinately smudging and rubbing. An impasto application allows for a maximalist approach to negation. Faigeles erases by covering over, never taking away. The paintings underneath squawk to the surface, contrasting with the one-and-done works on paper.

Faigeles wrote and animated a play titled Great Personality! Lauren published a zine featuring the play and seven poems. The play centers on Rebecca, a morbidly obese woman inhabiting an infinite white space, with Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who targets fat women for their skin. Faigeles is in love with the idea of destroying herself from the outside in, using Rebecca as a surrogate for the artist. Through Rebecca, Faigeles transfers the burden of self-destruction to a serial killer, illustrating a complex dynamic of self-preservation versus self-harm. In a bid to negotiate her survival, Rebecca proposes a compromise: allowing Bill to conduct plastic surgery on her, extracting half of her skin and fat in exchange for sparing her life. This negotiation underscores the paradox of having every desire to push forward but ultimately only having self-destructive tools at the ready. 

Faigeles delves into the interplay between reality and fiction, where the artist consumes and is consumed by the characters she creates and paints. This immersive process allows Faigeles to navigate limitless potentially perilous situations—taking agency over one’s self-destruction.