‘Bear the Sway,’ a solo exhibition of new works on paper from The Lost Colony Project at South Seattle Community College in Seattle, Washington.
January 11 – February 17, 2012
Bear the Sway, a new body of work by Lauren Adams, relates to the artist’s recent investigations into the ‘Lost Colony’ and Elizabethan colonialism. This series of works on paper is inspired by the watercolors of John White from the 1580’s, which feature native Algonquins and Secotans (located then in present-day North Carolina) performing rituals, planting crops, preparing food, and displaying their clothing, and also the formal portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and the explorers and voyagers (Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, etc.) who formed her colonial advisorship.
Bear the Sway is an exploratory series of paintings and drawings on paper and panel that lift, excise, and appropriate the found figures and clothing forms from the historical documents. The result is another facet of The Lost Colony Project, which visually collages the abstracted elements, creating charged absurdities that reflect the legacy of historical inequity in a contemporary visual language.
The basic tenet of this project is to resolve an understanding of the historical situations at work, and to interrogate the narratives and images, searching for a clearer display of the colonial power dynamics. Bear the Sway is also about the history of imagery as a site for political displays of power, which the artist utilizes as a directive when making her own imagery and objects. Seeking to transform the ‘given history’ into a new narrative, one that hopefully provides further agency to the appropriated narratives. In the The Lost Colony Project, the artist is exploring the relationship between costume, class, and social power.]]>