Lauren Grossman Sphincter

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“The work in Sphincter is part of my ongoing investigation into the imagery of Judeo/Christian culture and how these old sources can translate into contemporary objects. I have continued working from the Book of Isaiah and most recently looked into the Book of Job for its juicy bits on human frailty.

“Isaiah is a complicated and often contradictory collection of predictions of woe, destruction, and redemption. One of the aspects of these writings that interests me is that the same warnings have been ranted for millennia; continuing through generations, translations, and shifts of meaning—a very slow urgency. The thick, blunted glass heads embody this heavy sense of time, allowing an internal reverberation of sound and light. River and Remnant also germinated from Isaiah, particularly the metaphorical landscape imagery in the first half of the book. In my work, the physical manifestations of the texts are held aloft by braces or scaffolding—all things being subject to gravity.

“Job is all about human mortality and its limitations. In Torso of Job for example, I literally poured the text of Job’s affliction as hot iron onto a clay body, shattering the ceramic form. Trouble Came has Job’s protestations beaten over the surface of the head. Toward the end of Job, god expounds on the wonders of his creation, particularly his divine monsters, and thus the incomprehensibility of his own powers. The openings in the “Pierced Leviathans” are formed by the negative spaces of these descriptive texts.

“The intimate scale of the leviathan pieces and the tea bowl-sized hellmouths stresses the personal nature of monsters—our individual relationships to things described as beyond our control and understanding. Hellmouth reworks the common medieval image of the portal into hell as the jumbo orifice of some sort of animal, making hell into a sort of eternal digestion. Sometimes alluring (complete with sweet breath and feminine attributes) and sometimes repulsive, hellmouths were frequently conflated with the gaping maw of Leviathan. My version is sized for one.”

Lauren Grossman has been exhibiting her work for over thirty years in diverse venues as the Wright Exhibition Space, the Kirkland Art Center, the John Michael Koehler Art Center, Oregon State University, University of Wisonsin-Milwaukee, Cornish College of the Arts, University of Puget Sound, as well as galleries in the Northwest and nationally. Her work can be found in the collections of Microsoft, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the City of Seattle, Special Collections at the University of Washington, the Matthews Collection at the Arizona State University, as well as several private collections. This is her first exhibition at Platform.