The taxidermied animal is forever trapped in its final moment of trauma. Evidence of mutilation, of the abject gore which marks these last bloody moments, is politely tucked out-of-view. Glass eyes are fitted to freeze an uncanny expression: perhaps grief, or maybe resentment toward a human audience. In Lauren Lee’s work taxidermy acts as a monument, a ritual, a means of understanding and manifesting embodied and emotional trauma. To Lauren taxidermy is more salient than metaphor, more praxis than performance: through the nearly mystical process of turning the once-living into the forever-frozen Lauren’s work becomes a practice of empathy, a means of engaging with the masochism and fragility at the core of human relationships.
If the manipulation of materials becomes a conduit for the artist’s own experience, so too do Lauren’s work force the viewer to interrogate their own relationships with beauty and empathy: we see abjection, be it body horror or decomposition, paired with the delicacy of a faux-marble floor or a colorful tapestry. We recognize the fraught relationship between the aestheticized and the abject, and are made complicit in the rendering of these forms, that which was once living or once serviced human life, as objects for consumption and contemplation.
Lauren Lee (b. 1992, Silver Spring, MD) creates sculptures, installations, and drawings that examine the desire to find arousals in personal tragedies as coping mechanism. They explore nuanced feelings that oscillate on the spectrum of extremes in looking at aging, consuming of bodies and compartmentalizing of emotions. She received a BA from University of Maryland College Park in 2015 and an MFA from Yale University in 2020
