Lauren Frances Adams
BITTER HARVEST
March 27, 2010 - May 11, 2010
My activities for the past several years have been dual, in that I maintain a singular studio practice (where I make the majority of my own work), and I also maintain an interest in working with and presenting the projects of others. The latter, this extra-artistic activity, is most closely aligned with the history of curation and artist-run exhibitions. I hesitate to fully embrace the title of curator for myself, because of the understanding and respect that I have for the critical frameworks provided by professional curators. Yet, I am positive that a contemporary art world built by curators and non-curators alike leads to a rich landscape of exhibitions. My belief in this permeable, malleable world, populated by a variety of art institutions, makers, and thinkers, has inevitably fueled my desire for greater participation. Not as a curator, and not only as an artist.
In my own work, which often focuses on topical political and social issues, I seek alternative contexts for display. When working with other artists, in spaces this past year as varied as the Kemper Museum of Art at Washington University (with Allison Smith’s Needle Work), Cosign Projects in my South St. Louis City neighborhood (a flag gallery that has in the past year hosted seven artists), or the Des Lee Gallery in downtown St. Louis (for a student exhibition via a class that I offered), I value deviations from formalized art production and display systems. In each case listed, interaction with students, art school faculty, the local public and site context are considered. Often, I turn over the space entirely to the invited artists and I then become a technical advisor, a conceptual feedback platform, and sometimes production collaborator.
I am influenced by art historical models as varied as the Soviet avant-garde artists (and the exhibition, 5 x 5 = 25, that some organized in 1921), Group Material’s installation exhibitions, and the happenings of Allan Kaprow and the do-it-yourself attitude of the Fluxus movement. More recently, I have been inspired by the extra-artistic activities of Michelle Grabner, who runs The Surburban in her family’s Oak Park, Illinois, exterior garage; Allison Smith, who hosts Smiths, a ‘skills and stories’ exchange in her Oakland, California, storefront studio and apartment; and the innumerable and varied artist-fronted alternative initiatives that I have visited in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.
My goal with initiating and directing Cosign Projects is to foster a space, at the given location of my home and studio, where art, community, and cityscape can merge. My hope is that this space maintains the integrity of historical alternative exhibition explorations, all the while developing a unique focus, site-specific to the neighborhood and the artists who interact with it. I ask artists to design exterior projects that take into account the reality of the public location combined with their own artistic trajectories.
While this prompt has been widely interpreted and will continue to evolve as new projects are installed, my approach toward selecting a program for the gallery is not entirely idiosyncratic. I am interested in inviting artists to work with Cosign that possess a strategic political agenda, or artists that have a decidedly apolitical trajectory but who are interested in working in a relational manner, reaching out toward site-based and public contexts.
This agenda is reflected in my own installation for Cosign Projects. Bitter Harvest explores my long-ranging research in America’s military interventions abroad using the design construct of decorative ornamentation. While I would not typically use my own gallery space to show my work, nor in the past would I curate my work into an exhibition I have organized, I was recently challenged to overcome this bias. Cosign Projects has become an extra-artistic, extra-studio site. Your participation is invited.
-- Lauren Frances Adams, April 2010
