Sterling Lawrence

In his first solo show with the gallery, Sterling Lawrence assembles a group of sculptural deliberations on the failed utility of assigned function. In works inspired by photographs found in design catalogs featuring the work of Vico Magistretti and Charles and Ray Eames, he tempers the utilitarian nature of each component and drifts into territory of a more uncertain kind. Composed as a schematic, the installation works together through interrelated displacements; meaning and use are altered through contextual shifts and formal disturbances. The constituent elements in this show are temporal and modular, but come with imbedded limitations of structure. The historical ubiquity of the sourced forms ground the work in the familiar; quickly the recognizable is upended by some unexpected maneuver. Installed off-kilter or sometimes reduced to only the facade of the original, the works are left as distorted perspectives, indicators only of the temporality of their existence. If I Plucked You From the Sea suggests that our relationship to necessary use, design and utility is utopian; the reality is something infinitely more unstable.

Sterling Lawrence received his MFA in 2011 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . He’s currently an instructor in the Print Media Department at SAIC and adjunct faculty at Carthage University in Wisconsin. He has exhibited in Chicago with Tony Wight Gallery, devening projects + editions, New Capital via Forever and Always Gallery and Carrousel Space Projects. Sterling has also shown at Half/Dozen Gallery in Portland OR and Pacific Northwest College of Art. He lives and works in Chicago.