Thu, Dec 1, 2011 → Sat, Jan 7, 2012
Jayne Lawrence
San Antonio Express-NewsSubject Properties features new drawings and sculptural works by San Antonio-based artist Jayne Lawrence. This is her first one-person exhibition at the gallery.
Lawrence's work often includes three recurring symbols: the insect, which represents our alter ego or instinctual behavior; the human form, representing our physical selves; and architecture to represent the environment that we construct for ourselves to inhabit. For Subject Properties, she continues her examination of the social and cultural inconsistencies she finds in the paradigms we live by that affect identity and behavior, and applies them to our sense of place and the relationship between ourselves and our surroundings.
The title of the exhibition is a real estate term used to describe a baseline property established in order to calculate the economic assessment of comparable real estate. Lawrence uses it to refer to the initial imagery or visual gesture, focusing on the visual patterning, structural organization and/or the history in order to begin a search for comparable subject matter. At first glance, the connections are not necessarily obvious. She selects seemingly unrelated items, such as a harvest ant nest, a million dollar mansion and an apartment building under construction to assess the instinctual, stoical ant colony in comparison to the independent, self-contained, multi -unit complexes of human beings in one of her works. In another work, Lawrence begins with an image of an aerial view of an insect eaten callery pear leaf, a holy city in Iraq and a section of lower Manhattan to explore color, visual fractals and mapping. In this work, she touches upon the human need to hold onto that which we consider sacred: Our identity and place in the world.
Lawrence earned her MFA at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has been teaching since 2000. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, the International Sculpture Center in Hamilton, NJ, the Laredo Center for the Arts, the Museum of South Texas Institute for the Arts in Corpus Christi and the McNay Art Museum and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio.
