Particulate Dream

“In the past several years I have been through deep personal loss, and our political landscape has shifted radically. Being an artist entails not only the joy of making image on surface, but the unyielding, burning, overwhelming need to put the internal to the external.”

~ LAUREN BERGMAN

• FULL ARTIST STATMENT

I have expanded my focus from an exploration of female identity within the constructs of the idealized, mythicized America, and move in a new direction in which the female is minimally present.

These new paintings speak not only to my own loss but to the underlying fears of our current cultural climate. As we slide closer and closer to global crisis – an environment on the verge of collapse, an economy in which the disparity between rich and poor is ever-widening, threats of terrorism, nuclear holocaust, the fear created by having a madman as leader, and on and on.

I’ve begun to question whether there will be a future; or at least a future with humans in it. These paintings reflect my fears and yet also represent my hopes for the post-apocalypse. Maybe what remains after devastation will be the Utopia we had collectively imagined, rather than the dystopia we fear.

The surface of these paintings is torn and collaged astronomical maps printed on watercolor paper and the imagery is painted with gesso, polymerized litho-coal, and acrylic.

Lauren Bergman | New York City | 2018