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14/11/2005

Lauren Lavitt

Play Gallery (old location), Berlin

Flower Album

Curated by Hackermann Ines Virginia

Blameless and Shameless. Thus the sight of a flower reveals, it is true, the presence of this well-defined part of a plant, it is though impossible to stop at this superficial observation; in fact, the sight of this flower provokes much more significant reactions, because the flower expresses an obscure vegetal resolution. What the configuration and colour of the corona reveal, what the dirty traces of pollen or the freshness of the pistil betray doubtless cannot be adequately expressed by language; it is, however, useless to ignore (as generally done) this inexpressible real presence and to reject as puerile absurdities certain attempts at symbolic interpretation.

Flower Album is a collection of works, that celebrates and embraces colours and compositions, figures and landscapes and material relating and inspired from the artist's floral experience ''I make paintings, videos, photography and sculptural installations. I basically use what ever medium best articulates my ideas. I see painting and video as hunting and cooking – one can't live without the other''.

In this show Lauren Lavitt reveals all the contractions of her work between poetry, love, joys, horror, Los Angeles, sexual identity, pop culture, garlic and health. In fact, if Lavitt wouldn't be an artist reflecting on the erotic vomit, she would definitely be a nutritionist. The works in the show embrace a personal and fragmented narrative about the anxiety and joy of existing in a modern automobile driven in a metropolis such as L.A. Lauren Lavitt likes to drink kombucha tea, she lets herself be overdosed by ginger and garlic and green. She likes to explore the actions of religious sacrifice and erotic fusion. Like an Acéphale (the headless), she is fascinated by human sacrifice to love and hate, but she's not a physical executioner, Lavitt executes only the mind of the voyeur, by generously giving the homogeneity's need for deviance, as a breathtaking act of self-delimiting.

In Lavitt's videos the voyeur is left with the idea of something rather than having the smell or touch of it. Lavitt is interested in showing the limits of vision through video, the majority of her video work is about activations, whether that activations derives from video itself of a person watching it. It is good to talk about voyeur rather than public, since voyeur is the contemporary definition of spectator nowadays, especially when it comes to visual arts or TV, or porn. The more desperate the eroticism, the greater the attraction.

Flower Album is an overview of the young LA artist and her attention on deficit disorder, grotesque, sexual identity, haptics, love, nature, contractions, and voyeurism in this body of work...and flowers and their infinite misinterpretations. Men have linked the brilliance of flowers to their amorous emotions because on either side, it is a question of phenomena that precede fertilization. At stake here is clearly not the divination of the secret meaning of flowers, and one can easily make out the well-known property or adequate legend.

One would look in vain, moreover, for parallels that strikingly convey a hidden understanding of the things here in question. It matters little, in fact, that the columbine is the emblem of sadness, the snapdragon the emblem of desire, the waterlilly the emblem of indifference… It seems opportune to recognize that such approximations can be renewed at will, and it suffices to assign a primordial importance to much simpler interpretations, such as those that link the rose or the spurge to love.

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Lauren Lavitt
Born in 1980, in Los Angeles, California (USA).
Education: '02 –'05 M.F.A. University of California, L.A. / '98–'02 B.FA. Otis College of Art and Design.
Recent exhibition (a selection): Fair play Play_gallery for still and motion pictures, July '05, Berlin (Germany); Genderosity 4F gallery July '05, L.A. (USA); Anarchy Slamdance film festival July '05; Super Sonic Los Angeles Design Center, June '05, L.A. (USA); The path of the moons and planets Crazy Space, March '05, Santa Monica CA (USA); MFA thesis shows UCLA March '05, UCLA L.A. (USA); Gea's Sweets Bologna Flash Art Fair, January '05, Bologna (Italy); 1234 Thing Studio, Venice CA (USA) December '04; Blanking The Smell L.A. (USA) June '04; Summer show Anna Helwing gallery L.A. (USA), July '04; Where the art stops and starts The Latch gallery L.A. (USA) January '04.

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Private view: Friday, 15th November 2005, 7pm

Play Gallery for still and motion pictures
Hannoverschestr. 1 - Berlino

Opening hours: Wed – Sat, 2 – 7pm

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