Shawn Powell and Lauren Yeager are Ohio based artists who focus on overlooked quotidian objects in their work, each adopting a philosophical tangent consistent with their commentary and interests. A sly sense of humor is common ground found in both bodies of work.
Lauren Yeager is a conceptual artist adept at creating deadpan arrangements of spent and discarded objects in her photography, sculpture, and installations. Always conscious of framing, and context, she accumulates multi-colored,scavenged functional objects in a variety of combinations-; a tower of stacked buckets, deflated balls, combs, rows of traffic cones - to create a taxonomy of familiar objects. Yeager’s process allows us to “reconsider the definition of making.”
Shawn Powell belongs to the rich lineage of painters challenging the Western canon of mimetic illusion on the flat canvas. Yet, his conceptually rigorous canvases, supremely confident and well crafted, betray a passion for the medium. In his newest series, Powell indirectly alludes to cinema, taking on the visual grammar of Daniel Buren’s striped canvases, with a special spin. Scaled to the size of a beach towel, the striped pattern of each painting addresses the towel conceit in a different arrangement of folds and colors, creating a panoply of geometry throughout.