Yearning For New Physics

MARQUEE PROJECTS is pleased to announce Yearning For New Physics, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by New York artist Laura Kaufman. A reception for the artist will be open to the public on Saturday, May 4th from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibition will run from Saturday, May 4th through Monday, May 27th, 2018.

Through language and geometric abstraction, Laura Kaufman builds and undermines existing systems of shapes, words, and numbers. She makes high-touch sculptural objects, constructed works on canvas, and drawings on paper by joining, embroidering, weaving, folding, and printing with materials including felt, steel, linen, and cotton. Her work often refers to landscape, minimalism, information, and traditional textile crafts, inventing new, blended relationships. Physical processes such as marking, painting, joining, folding, and weaving allow her to hover between drawing and sculpture.

In both Kaufman’s Redacted Sampler series on linen and Plaids drawing series on paper, she starts with phrases she’s found in scientific reporting on the search for dark matter. She rearranges and anagrams these phrases, creating voids and conduits of form, while retaining the original phrase as the title. Kaufman then removes the words from these forms and converts them to material form by replacing them with drawn lines or embroidered thread. Both practices reference textile traditions, whether the samplers made by young girls in colonial America, or the draft patterns for woven plaids.

Kaufman’s geometric sculptural felt constructions of woven slabs extends her interest in interlaced forms. The weave is a natural fit for the felt, whose wool fiber is already agitated into an interlocking slab, allowing her to build and draw simultaneously. It’s her intention to create forms that are both topographical and architectural, using the weaving structures found in domestic textiles. Like her drawings and works on canvas, Kaufman’s felt pieces are rich in their complexity and refined in their simplicity.

Ms. Kaufman’s work has been exhibited nationally, including at Grace Farms, New Canaan, CT; The Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY; University Art Museum, University of Albany; Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY; Biers Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; Field Projects Gallery, New York, NY; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; and the AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY. In 2012 she received an outdoor sculpture commission on Randall’s Island, NY as part of the First AIM Biennial and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Awards and residencies include Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts; Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Kaufman is an educator at Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY and Grace Farms, New Canaan, CT. She received an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and a BA in Studio Art from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY.