Apophany!

Lindsay Lawson Apophany! 28 January - 3 March 2022 Apophenia is an inclination towards pattern recognition. It locates links and symbols, the patholog- ical analysis is that this is a false activity, the searching of a disordered mind. But isn’t this similar to the occupation of the artist: moving between discrete points and turning connections into matter? Scaled, chromed and rising from a swamp, Lindsay Lawson’s new paintings and sculptures emerge from different mechanical and digitized processes of her studio. The artist imagines a bestial ab- stracted world of texture and surface, where the images of mass media are swallowed whole and regurgitated into new gestural shapes. The paintings move in and out of registration, their faux croc- odile skin substrate deforms and abstracts the imagery it supports: a conspiracy theorist knows that the one real truth lies within themselves. Lindsay Lawson’s works form like pearls. Specialized pearlescent paints are applied by hand to 3D prints, growing and inflating, these objects morph surreally from their origins. The grit and grime of modern life, its headlines and disasters, is submitted to a development process that coats her bags, hats and paintings. What’s being smuggled in this luggage? The perforated messages are composed of an American politician’s leaked emails, now etched through graphite covered sculptures. Gaps and redactions punctuate both the writing and the forms, and through these holes leaks a corrosive substance. Dis- solving and mutating it appears to have unpredictable properties. Contributing to what Daniel Horn once called Lawson’s “nonchalantly paranoid-schizoid installation”. It passes through all matter, bringing towards the center a proliferation of objects, transformed by their relationship to sight and information. In Apophany! the exhibition space becomes a landscape of competing time frames, the rapid pace of the 24-hour media cycle crashes against the geological age of the ocean. From the gap pro- duced by this conflict, Lindsay Lawson extracts a series of psychedelically beautiful objects. Lindsay Lawson (*1982, USA) lives and works in Berlin. Institutional exhibitions include (selection) Kunstverein Leipzig, Leipzig; Berghain, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris and in the 9th Berlin Biennale.