COSMIC GEOMETRIES: The Prairie's Edge

Although it was not until the very end of the 1960’s, near her fiftieth year, that Alice Lauffer came into her artistic maturity, the previous decade had by no means been without activity for her. It was during those year that, Lauffer, under the professional name of Loray-Comte, worked as a highly successful independent commercial artist. She also expanded on her earlier training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts by attending night classes at the School of the Art Insistute of Chicago and by studying with Paul Weighardt at the Evanston Art Center. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Lauffer was also a regular (and rather successful) participant at he major summer art fairs held in the Chicago area, where she exhibited watercolors. 

It is difficult to document the chronology precisely here - she rarely dated her works - but at a moment in 1968 Lauffer turned her attention to the airbrush and the ellipse, and would turn these two elements into the touchstone of her art. Her command of the airbrush dated to her experiences as a commercial artist, and her application of it to these paintings seems to reflect a desire for an autonomy of touch, a removal of direct manila interaction with the surface of the paintings, replacing contact with something more subtle and more pristine. In this, and in her urge toward abstraction and in the sequential examination of a formal device, Lauffer was in accord with many of the concerns activating the national art scene at that moment, resulting in the movement we now identify as Minimalism.

The Ellipse or oval shapes that were called into being with her airbrush certainly had special significance for Lauffer. It is a pleasingly volumetric shape, and Lauffer engaged it in endless episodes of intriguing modeling. The not-so-subtle female overtones of the shape were also fully exploited, and by the end of the 1970’s Lauffer was using titles like Phaedra, Andromeda, DNA Totem, and Receptor. This egg-like shape could (and did) easily metamorphose into flower bud or vulva, rich and evocative and sensual, an object of consummate design that is capable of continual extrapolation.

EXCERPTED FROM “Alice Lauffer: The Perseverance of Vision” by James Yood, and published in Alice Lauffer - A Retrospective Exhibition on the occasion of her exhibition at the Illinois State Museum in 1988.

"...I frequently use crochet, a technique that was passed down to me by my maternal grandmother, who in turn learned it from her mother. The series, Atavia, consists of three tower-like structures, each dedicated to three women ancestors whose energy and life work has had an impact on me (see attached statement). The towers were inspired by the transmission towers that dominate the landscape around the area of Gray, Indiana. The idea of somehow transmitting messages to my grandmothers and great grandmothers through manual work that I inherited from them was a seed for the work.

The magic I seek is to awaken in the viewer the awe that I feel about the material world and its possibilities, something that gets lost in the rush from consumption to discarding. I embrace a posthumanist view of materials (Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter); I see materials as exerting their own agency and energies on humans and deserving of our care and consideration."

- Georgina Valverde

The Wisconsin-born and based artist Michelle Grabner is known for her broad perspective developed as teacher, writer and critic over the past 30 years. The site where it all comes together is the studio. Her artmaking—which encompasses a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, video and sculpture—is driven by a distinctive value in the productivity of work and takes place outside of dominant systems. Grabner instead finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community.

Central to the work is process. Grabner uncovers new dynamic relationships through her visionary practice of repetition. With a deep attention to abstract patterns and all the metaphors they conjure, Grabner pushes the limits of compositional structures to discover the tipping point between stability and precariousness; between continuance and wondrous difference.

Grabner states of her work,“I have always been a painter who examines various power structures inherent in patterns and abstract arrangements. Because I believe that all forms are political, I have committed myself and 30 years of painting to re-articulating vernacular patterns in order to shift the unobserved into critical sight. This general overview has been foundational to my studio work since 1990.”