Ruptured Dichotomies: Lauren Bradshaw and Theo Trotter

Ruptured Dichotomies: Lauren Bradshaw and Theo TrotterThe Crit Lab presents Ruptured Dichotomies, an exhibition of works from our first Crit Lab Peekskill Dennis Fox Fellowship residents, Lauren Bradshaw and Theo Trotter. The exhibition and catalog present a selection of individual and collaborative works from the artists. At The Crit Lab we believe artists can and should share resources to build better ecosystems. In this spirit, and in honor of our dear friend Dennis Fox (1955 2019), we have created

The Crit Lab presents Ruptured Dichotomies, an exhibition of works from our first Crit Lab Peekskill Dennis Fox Fellowship residents, Lauren Bradshaw and Theo Trotter. The exhibition and catalog present a selection of individual and collaborative works from the artists.

At The Crit Lab we believe artists can and should share resources to build better ecosystems. In this spirit, and in honor of our dear friend Dennis Fox (1955-2019), we have created this live/work summer residency.

The work of Lauren Bradshaw and Theo Trotter explores material intimacy in objects of defiant vulnerability. The visibility of fracture, wound, and bodily transformation is both discomfiting and beautiful, familiar forms rendered strange, new identities knit together with a confrontational delicacy. These artists bring a fragile strength to bodily references, tangled softness of lace pierced with a sharp pin, shriveled sinew of latex, bloodied bandages countered by nail polish, panty hose and makeup. The trappings of childish femininity are repurposed into mutable bodies in the act of formation, continually in motion, turning away from, turning towards, turning into, perpetually in the act of becoming. In both their collaborative and individual works, Bradshaw and Trotter place unfinish, openness, and a tactile grisly beauty as an explicit priority, one of desire and repulsion, of flayed emotion and skin that challenges and seduces. Like a birth in process, hard to look at and hard to look away from, these objects are unapologetic in their abject beauty and rebellious tenderness.