Modernist Utopia: Solo Exhibition at Sea Ranch Lodge
I’m pleased to announce Modernist Utopia, my solo exhibition opening at the Sea Ranch Lodge in Sea Ranch, California. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday July 12th 4 pm - 6 pm.
In Modernist Utopia, San Francisco-based artist Jessie Laura employs a minimalist aesthetic that encourages viewers to develop parallels between her artwork, the Sea Ranch Project, and an otherworldly place of near-perfection.
Relying on clean lines, as well as monochromatic white and black surfaces, Laura’s reduced visual idiom distills both its appearance and messaging down to the most basic of elements. Through their engage- ment with minimalism, Laura’s objects seek a clarity of thought and design that gesture toward a utopic state of intellect and form in service of aesthetic pleasure and conceptual rigor.
Similar to Sea Ranch’s goal of developing an environmentally consci- ous architecture, Modernist Utopia engages the natural world through the intentional construction of its objects. Namely, Laura developed many of the artworks featured in this exhibition using formal patterns that reference the natural world and its microscopic building blocks. In doing so, she has created a body of work that asks us to consider the relationship between art and the environment. What are their points of confluence? In what ways do they contradict one another? And, ultimately, how can we rethink these relationships in our pursuit of an ever-elusive utopia?
Whether or not one can achieve utopian states, though, is irrelevant. What is important to both Laura’s artwork and the Sea Ranch project are their ambitions to meld human artistry with the natural world in the hope of producing a dynamic synthesis.
For further information contact: info@thesearanchlodge.com
Responsive Eye Series, 2023.
Courtesy of The Sea Ranch Lodge.