Logical Mutations: Elizabeth Folk & Colin Roberts

Launch Gallery is proud to present Logical Mutations, an exhibition featuring new work by Colin Roberts and Elizabeth Folk. Through sculpture, each artist presents recognizable forms in new and interesting ways to challenge our understanding of signs, meaning, and culturally derived object associations.        

Roberts’ work explores various themes around the fragile human condition. Kaleidoscopic Glass  Pillows, Tiny Men On Tits, Prosthetic beings, and resin Bubble Wrap sculptures are some of his creations. They are experiments obscured in strange and fantastical ways using surrealism and abject tactics, among others. Among the work, the pillow shaped patchwork sculptures are multi-colored and refract light like a mirrored disco ball. The Tiny Men On Tits series are sculptures of realistic life-size women’s breasts with tiny naked men on them performing various tasks and rituals. Trapped on the island-like breast, the men are dependent on the giant breast for survival - speaking to the relationship between men and women, and the sexual, social politics of gender roles. With a constant exploration of materials and techniques combined with uncanny imagery from a vast array of sources, Roberts creates a careful balance of humor, science, and horror. Calculated to lead the viewer to question their personal thoughts on various subjects, the works have the ability to cross significant cultural, social, and psychic boundaries. 

Folk’s work investigates the visual language of privilege, power, and whiteness in the United States through problematizing the aesthetics of mid-century furniture, home décor, and landscape design. The clean, utilitarian lines that notoriously embody mid-century design are disrupted with hairy silicone forms and kinetic elements. The silicone forms are manufactured using materials and methods prevalent in the reborn doll community - an Internet-based grassroots DIY culture that produces hyperreal newborn baby dolls. These forms offer a meditation on the fraught relationship between modernism and corporeality, and present material practices identified with post-modern domesticity and female innovation. References to the Salton Sea (California’s largest lake, an accidental and booming vacation oasis in the 50s, and now an environmental disaster) throughout the work serve as a metaphor for the inevitable and necessary decay of enigmatic American myths. Mid-century design champions an understanding of materiality and an appreciation of craftsmanship, but is born of a history and ideological era occurring before the Civil Rights movement, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and before the victories of second-wave feminism. As art, design, social ideology, and politics are inextricably linked, Folk asks us to consider what it means to continue to curate these objects into our built environments and online identities.