Laura Hudspith: Tl;dr

Exhibition dates: Thursday, May 18 – Sun, May 28

For the final exhibition at our Queen Street East location, Project Gallery is pleased to present Laura Hudspith’s second solo exhibition, TL;DR.

Hudspith transforms the gallery into a dramatic installation combining sculpture, video projection, and neon, where light emanating from each work illuminates the next. Her projected tableaux vivant depicts a near motionless woman amidst both real and faux, fresh and rotting delicacies, conjuring a sense of stagnation and tension. A large unmarked grave across the gallery’s floor pulses light and sets a synthetic overgrown garden aglow, its dense flora saturated with viscous biofluids. Neon light casts the flippant message ‘tl;dr’ across the scene, and creates a sense of an impassable force.

Upon discovering her own incongruous memory of a passage written by Alice Munro in Lives of Girls and Women, where the young protagonist misunderstands the gravity of a gruesome truth and instead envisions an implausible alt-reality, Hudspith staged and filmed her own elaborated version of this illogical error. In her tableaux, a woman lays on a cold marble tabletop amidst a feast. The figure is at once hyper-sexualized and neutered, her body revealed underneath a clear plastic dress so tight as to flatten her curves. Fruit begins to rot, pink milk sours, a glass of black liquid is overturned. What's left reveals its synthetic nature - a silicone aspic, plastic fruit, pink rubber tarts - and the woman in the dress remains breathing lightly.

The artist is interested in the effects of cultural trends on the way people understand the world’s workings and their agency within it. In particular, Hudspith contemplates the effects of individualist culture on radicalization and the growing divide between socio-political ideologies. Using a feminist lens through which to examine this divide, TL;DR creates a picture of contemporary communication caught in between cause and effect, dialogue and the echo chamber, life and death, gender and equity, and naivete versus the explicit.