Lauren Rice
Lauren Rice is a visual artist based in Richmond, VA. She has exhibited her work in solo, collaborative and group exhibitions at venues such as Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NYC), Neon Heater (Findlay, OH), ICA Baltimore (Baltimore), The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach), Transformer (Washington, DC) and Spring Break Art Show (NYC), among many others. Rice has been a Fellowship Artist at The Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and an artist-in-residence at The Luminary in St. Louis, MO. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine and VAST Magazine.
Although rooted in painting, Rice’s recent work takes the form of mixed media collage on paper and intersects with the worlds of drawing and sculpture. She uses both additive and subtractive methods of mark-making and explores how the crumple, the fold, the curl, the cut, the erased and the cover up, can be a means to visually compress, distort and rearrange information.
Lauren Rice’s work is a playful experiment into finding order with a wide assortment of materials, processes and marks. She does not begin with a preconceived idea of what the end result will be. Instead, her studio practice has long been preoccupied with bringing together disparate parts and studio scraps in order to discover a new and unexpected “whole”. This practice feels more urgent considering our present national and global circumstances. Independent bits and pieces, which on their own can seem insignificant, begin to reference the relationship between the individual and the community. Through Rice’s collecting and arranging of various parts into new contexts, she continues to explore the boundaries between dichotomies--order and chaos, prominence and obscurity, control and chance, and elegance and awkwardness.
