Denise Laws
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(415) 377-9457
My artistic practice is rooted in collage, abstraction, and assemblage, distilling and transforming the consumer clutter and waste of the everyday. Mylar Reveries Series is my current and ongoing body of work conjured, although the medium's limitations continuously evolve into limitless material-driven collages. While some artists work in precious metal and gold leaf, the remnants of our current disposable consumer culture have become my silver leaf. I am inspired to rescue the predestined discard of mass-produced foil-lined food packaging, such as Tetra-Pak, candy wrappers, teabag packaging liners, and coffee bag pouches.
My art-making process involves a quiet yet lengthy accumulation and collation, which never ends. I cull each piece of foil-lined packaging from personal use, community giveaways, and finds. The surface is essential; fusing texture with emotional dialog navigates my decisions. I indulged in a journey allowing and realizing an image, and I'll go with what resonates. My approach is meditative, methodical, and highly repetitive. I often start with organic shapes, forms, and patterns when I create. I strive to elevate what has been discarded through arrangement and revealing hidden beauty. Everyday cast-offs are re-cast and combined into shimmering baroque futuristic motifs and topographies. The work narrates through a mixture of re-appropriated materials, which I alter, develop and expand into a series of constructs. The work is symbiotic; these ongoing series within Mylar Reveries Series are outgrowths of each other, therefore often relating conceptually and are a minimal, fluid semblance. With my continuing interest in textures, fabrications, and the broad spectrum of the interior, exterior, and re-purposed packaging materials, I attempt to conjure an awakening or re-awakening of the ordinary in the spirit of surrealism and dadaism and the readymades. I want to disengage and reveal the beauty hidden within a disposable consumer culture re-focusing through a different lens/filter on what we acquire and consume.
