Phantom Stair
Roswell Museum, New Mexico
September 10 - Oct 23, 2022
Artist lecture
This was the dream: I was in a house I did not know… I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar….
Carl Jung, 1909
Lauren Clay’s installations and sculptures allude to the ethereal architecture of dreams, visionary experiences, and astral travel. In sleep each night, we cross a threshold from waking conscious life, into the realm of the unknown, where mysterious parts of ourselves constellate into images, known as dreams. At this hypnagogic gateway, the body slips into the indeterminate theater of the dream world. Influenced by both personal and collective dream imagery, Clay transforms this amorphous subject matter into a physical reality that is ornate and visceral. Her relief sculptures compress and distort space through forced-perspective carvings and hand-painted shadows. Stairs, doorways, windows, and energetic pathways, intertwine, alluding to passageways that are never quite attainable. Clay’s work often incorporates mural-sized digitally printed imagery composed from scanned enlargements of collages, constructed from marbleized paper. These works are invitations for the viewer to enter and complete the scene by turning the gaze inward with their own mind’s eye.