Laura Iris Blau: An Emerging Artist I’ve Known from (literally) Day One

Laura Iris Blau, "The Female Eunuch"

Feeling growing revulsion against the excesses associated with the economic bubble that has burst, some collectors are looking at the work of emerging artists in a new way---not as a speculative opportunity for making a killing by getting in early on the next new thing, but as a way to acquire affordable works of quality, for rewards that are strictly personal.

In that spirit, and in harmony with this week's "out with the old, in with the new" theme, CultureGrrl ventures where she has never gone before (and probably won't ever go again)---a rave for a young artist with no exhibition track record other than a recent MFA show at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

What's worse, I know her personally.

Laura Iris Blau, a Brooklyn artist who imbues her meticulously crafted sculptural assemblages with troubled and troubling psychological intensity and a dash of black humor, is the daughter of my long-time friends. Overriding my strong taboo against reviewing someone to whom I have a personal connection is my stronger conviction that this is work of such beauty and power that it demands attention.

Laura's wall pieces and freestanding book-based sculptures conform to the scruffy, found-material aesthetic of the New Museum's  Unmonumental, the inaugural show in its new building, which I previously described as "a scrappy display [that] is a welcome corrective to the market-obsessed, reputation-fixated artworld."

But the found materials in Laura's (now closed) show, Proof (read), pack an emotional punch: They're the feminist and child-rearing bibles of her mother's (which is to say, my) young adulthood---The Female Eunuch (above), The Hite Report, Understanding Pregnancy and Childbirth, The Drama of the Gifted Child, etc., etc. She has exploded, sliced, shredded and (in some cases) embedded these hoary texts with talismans from her own difficult personal journey to adulthood.

Aside from what they say about Laura's private struggles, these blasted books, removed from her mother's personal bookshelf, read to me as a detonation of my generation. I know all of these books by their covers, if not always by their contents. The message seems to be: "You devoured all these books to learn how to be the strong New Woman and the Perfect Mother, and look at what you came up with---imperfect me." The joke, which cuts both ways, is delivered with aesthetic elan and painstaking focus on detail.

I was relieved to read in Laura's online description of the project that it brought her "closer with my own mother....We can now more freely discuss these issues...like never before."

"Cathartic" does have "art" in it.

Images of book-based pieces from Laura's thesis show are here and here. While you can get a good sense of the wall pieces, the photos can't do justice to the freestanding altered books, which have layers of meaning (and felicitous visual encounters) embedded within the layers of the pages.

Her home page, from which you can access her description of the project, as well as contact information, is here. The website is still a work-in-progress (which is why I had to wait so long to post this). The art, to my eyes, is ready for its close-up: