Born 1980, in Cleveland Heights, OH, lives and works in Detroit, MI
Received her MFA from Ohio State University, Columbus, OH and her BA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA
Sienna Gallery, Lenox, MA
www.laurenkalman.com
In her gilded adornments Lauren Kalman investigates body image politics through an unlikely marriage of conceptual goldsmithing and bodily transgression. Trained in jewelry making and metalsmithing, Kalman creates jeweled objects that become the props for performative photographs and videos. She often presents the crafted ornaments alongside the photographic work in displays that mine the gulf between the idealized body and the reality of bodily experience, and traverse the hazy and contested divide between art and craft.
Kalman’s interest in the body, adornment, and image is featured in Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments (2009). In this series, Kalman uses golden acupuncture needles, set with precious stones and pearls, to pierce her skin in arrangements that simulate dermatological conditions such as acne, warts, shingles, syphilis, and gonorrhea. The beautifully grotesque, punctured bodies on display suggest contemporary associations with body modification, fetish, and commodification. In her photographs she quotes the exact compositions of disease illustrations found in historical medical texts where the naked female form was oft-presented as medical subject and sexualized object. By using her own body as model and stage, Kalman takes up the politics of the imaged female body—a strategy that connects her practice to a longer history of feminist body art.
