Lauren O'Connor-Korb
Lauren O’Connor-Korb is a sculptor and educator originally from the San Francisco Bay area. She holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA and a Bachelor’s degree in spatial art from San Jose State University in San Jose, CA. Her accolades include the juror’s award at the 2020 Wiregrass Biennial, the International Sculpture Center’s 2019 Outstanding Student Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture, and the 2020 Excellence in Graduate Research Award from the University of Georgia.
Using language as a guidepost, I look at the way Western culture assigns narrative significance to experiences and moments in history. By focusing on the objects we preserve and narratives we perpetuate in our teachings and writings, I explore the latent error in translation between projected meaning and reality. Sculpture becomes a language we can use to understand the gap between the things we say and the things we create.
I build sculptures, objects and contraptions, and laboriously and invisibly imbue them with the quirks and flaws that are the hallmark of humanity. The machines I devise appear haunted, not only because of their lack of operator, but because they recall a history before digitization as we know it: an iron wistfully puffing out smoke signals, a trumpet independently stumbling through a jazz classic, a cowboy hat slowly rotating and rearing like a mechanical bull that’s just going through the motions. These animated accessories become stand-ins for their human counterparts. Their performance, stripped of function, becomes both ridiculous and melancholy. The viewer is enticed to question the nature of the object and their absent creator.