Strauss Bourque-LaFrance "In The The Spring"

Kansas

poster for Strauss Bourque-LaFrance "In The The Spring"

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KANSAS presents In The The Spring, a solo exhibition of new work by Strauss Bourque-LaFrance.

In The The Spring takes its name from the common text illusion, Paris In The The Spring, where typically one THE is omitted when read aloud. The illusion is meant to illustrate how the mind affects what one sees, the way expectation and imagination can eclipse reality. In this instance, Bourque-LaFrance has omitted PARIS, opening the phrase to elicit a sense of desire, waiting and promise. Be it an excitement or proclamation suspended in apprehension, the mystery of In The The Spring comes not in the words, but in their placement, their budding redundancy and fruitless aesthetic awkwardness.

The exhibition will unveil a mise-en-scène scattered with symbols of love and desire, displaced among an abstract field of white walls and white, wall-to-wall carpeting. Arrangement becomes medium, where objects in space refer to the way visual information is presented and circulated in retail displays, cinema montage, exhibitions and most importantly, in the home, where a work of art goes. These components are often paired with paintings or sculptures - or perhaps more apt, sculptures of paintings - created from humble or outmoded materials and technologies. Universal symbols ranging from the ancient to the Internet are sampled, looped then remixed into a new symbology that pays homage to artists past and revels in a generation's failure to create its own visuality. In this way, Bourque-LaFrance is a curator of his own wares; the work acquires content and is transformed by its adjacency to other objects and images. SBL's fascination with material culture and its hold on desire and identity has brought him to investigate the aesthetics of mass produced luxury: the condo, granite, stainless, central air, palms. Spring cleaning. The installation becomes a proscenium and the audience a player asked to decode characters and references while transforming the whiteness of carpet from pristine to pathway.

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance (b. 1983, Poland Spring, Maine) lives and works in New York City. He received his BA from Hampshire College in 2006, MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2010 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan ME. He is currently an Artist in Residence at Movement Research. This is Strauss Bourque-LaFrance's first solo show with KANSAS.

[Image: Strauss Bourque-LaFrance "Staging the Efforts of a Revolving Cause" (2012) Concrete, vinyl vase, black rose, paint and digital print on canvas, 74 x 48 in.]

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Schedule

from January 04, 2013 to February 16, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-01-04 from 18:00 to 20:00

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