Lauren Walkiewicz: Future Gardens
February 3rd, 2023 – February 26th, 2023
First Fridays Opening Reception 2/3
6:00 pm - 10:00 pm
PRACTICE Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Lauren Walkiewicz, entitled Future Gardens.
My body of work fantasizes about a future evolution of humanity that is in harmony with nature. Today, as we enter the apocalyptic phase of climate change, we as a species are facing our own destruction.
Our environmental consumption has left us with a debt to the gods that will be paid in blood, floods, and fire. After the reckoning, what will a balanced relationship with nature look like? What will humanity have to give up? How would it feel for humans to experience and interact with the world, but be unable to alter it?
My installations imagine what this world would look like: a place where humans are stripped of thumbs and guns, live in harmony with their discarded inventions, and co-exist with a new vanguard of dominant plants and animals. This is a world where the carnivorous descents of genetically modified chickens prowl parking lots for their next meal, hairless rodents turn discarded wrappers into homes, and a new species of blue-skinned, orange-hoofed humanoids fights for survival. This utopia is not the human centric Garden of Eden, but a place where pleasures are balanced equally with the pain of survival. Future Gardens is an extension of that work.”
Lauren Walkiewicz is a New York City based painter and installation artist who explores futuristic mythologies of a world after the climate apocalypse. Using intricately cut pvc panel and acrylic paint, Walkiewicz’s non-linear narratives explore the new denizens of earth, and their sensual and violent world. Walkiewicz earned a BFA from the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design in 2013 and works as a middle school art educator in the Bronx. She has shown in New York with SPRING/BREAK art show, 550 Gallery, and The Locker Room. She was recently featured in I Like Your Work’s Spring Catalog “Through Mossy Ways” and Create Magazine issue #32. Walkiewicz has been an artist in residence at RUC residency in Valcamonica, Italy, and the NARS Foundation International Residency.