Brian R. Jonescast

Lauren Gallaspy is a Southern artist who recently moved to Utah to teach at the University of Utah. She grew up in the middle of Nowheresville, TN after her parents retired from the spy business. As interesting as her life story is, her work conveys its own sense of depth, life, organics, and a kind of decay that is found in parts of the world that are humid, hot, and teeming with life. In her own words, Lauren says that "my work is about that imbalance: the vulnerability of living things and the sometimes violent, sometimes pleasurable, almost always complex consequences that occur when bodies and objects in the world come into contact with one another. I use ornamentation, obsessive mark-making, and decorative imagery as a kind of devotional or transformational act, a way to render interior spaces and intense psychological experiences physically." It was a pleasure to talk to her at NCECA in Houston (she was an Emerging Artist this year) and I look forward to seeing what comes out of her studio in the futur