Lauren Yeager

For the first FRONT International in 2018, Cleveland-based Lauren Yeager produced an indoor field of Sculpture Bases made from urban detritus scavenged from the artist’s roaming. The new works expand upon those totemic forms. They consist of groupings of several stacked elements, now occupying larger footprints, which define the individual works. Several pairs of photographs accompany the installation, bringing outdoor public space into the exhibition, and highlighting Yeager’s very particular vision of the richness of Cleveland’s urban topography.

As an anthropologist would examine use value of the objects, Yeager attempts to leave preconceptions behind and explores the apparent physical properties of the found objects, allowing a predetermined structure to assert itself, thereby building the physical scaffold around a concept, one which, in turn, is suggested by those found items. Unaltered objects are presented very directly, so that they may be simultaneously nameable objects as well as a collective work of art.

Yeager wants the viewer to move through the space she constructs inside the gallery with her, and has positioned works to force a sense of physical depth, a foreground and background with multiple points of view, striking a reverberation between the objects we own and the spaces we occupy in order to expand upon the potential of both. She brings motion and stillness into the work; monuments move off the podium into the domestic realm.

Yeager a native of Nashville, TN, received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009. Since then her work has been highlighted in several important national and regional exhibitions including Sculpture Milwaukee 2021, FRONT International (2018), Artists to Watch: Women at Work, and moCa Cleveland’s Anticipation is Better than Realization (2009). Her work has been placed with collections of Progressive Insurance, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and other prominent private collections.

She was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in 2021.

She will present a solo exhibition at Abattoir Gallery in September, 2022.