Lauren Moses

Lives and works in Charlottesville, VA, USA

Artist statement

Statement My paintings begin with images that already carry histories: hunting scenes, mythological bodies, animals, flowers, gestures of violence and desire. I draw fragments from paintings whose visual languages remain strangely alive, then reconstruct them until their inherited hierarchies begin to give way. I am interested in the point at which an image ceases to hold itself together. Figures emerge and disappear; passages of description collide with abstraction; space opens and abruptly flattens. Recognition is offered but never allowed to settle. Increasingly, I want the construction of the painting to remain visible, so that looking becomes an experience of watching something form, persuade, and destabilize itself at once. Underlying the work is an interest in the afterlife of inherited images and the structures of power embedded within them: desire, possession, beauty, violence. Rather than retelling their histories, I ask what survives within their forms, how those forms continue to organize perception, and what becomes possible when their authority is made unstable again.

Artwork