Lauren Satlowski
Please Allow the Pipes to Function

2 December, 2023 - 27 January, 2024

Office Baroque is pleased to announce, Please Allow the Pipes to Function, the first exhibition at the gallery by Los Angeles-based artist, Lauren Satlowski, on view from 2 December 2023  thru 27 January 2024. A preview will be held on Saturday 2 December from 6 till 8pm. 

Lauren Satlowski’s practice brushes against the limits of painterly representation by crafting a thinly layered veil that distorts the everyday. Her compositions elaborate on careful arrangements of commonplace objects, such as flowers, glass tchotchkes and beans. Through these, she opens up an arena where memory, myth and the banal come into play, vibrating against saturated colorfields and gradients that trace the contours of perception. Sunlight flows over and through these tactile objects, transfiguring familiar materials into something brightly ineffable. The resulting forms are both ephemeral and concrete, tiny monuments existing in sealed-off spaces, where personal significance and cultural resonance intertwine according to their own oblique logic. 

The exhibition derives its title from a sign above a communal, utility sink in Satlowski’s Art Deco studio building. It implores users to only pour liquid down the drain so as to not damage the antique plumbing. Interacting daily with the sign while washing paint brushes, it became a type of personal mantra: Please allow the pipes to function.  The repeated encounters expanded this meaning far beyond the immediate directive and it became interwoven with the intention of the work, an analog for facilitating movement through channels of seeing, thinking and assigning meaning. Indeed, in this new series of paintings compositional elements unfold in fluid ways, mapping out energy flows rather than static reservoirs of visual contemplation. Surfaces become porous. It is an active exchange that transfigures these various mementos into conduits. 

The impulse to discover a title rather than author one highlights Satlowski’s penchant for utilizing what’s available within arms reach. At the onset of this project, she began acquiring items found during walks near her studio in downtown Los Angeles while meditating on the intensity of commerce within the neighboring flower, fabric, and jewelry districts. Sourcing and arranging materials, Satlowski references 17th century Golden Age and 18th century Rococo painting, while revisiting cartoons, ornamental consoles, and commercial photography.

In the resulting body of still life paintings, a figure travels, objectified, across surfaces. The robber girl in Pillow, the ceramic figurines in Various Clairs, the iron-on patch in Cult  Classic act as alter egos, incomplete and skewed doubles of the self, or flattened versions of feminine archetypes. While most of the paintings depict objects in an oneiric vacuum, there is a looming presence, a metonymic figure at work. 

In regard to collecting and flattening, Satlowski cites “On Longing” by poet and critic, Susan Stewart. Therein, she elaborates how ‘souvenirs’ possess a potential as stand-ins for lived experiences:  

“The pressed flowers under glass speak to the significance of their owner in nature and not to themselves in nature. They are a sample of a larger and more sublime nature, a nature differentiated by human experience, by human history. The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”1  

Satlowski encourages us to engage with her practice along these terms – as souvenirs buoyant with all the energy, intimacy, and fractured memories of a significant object; an embodiment of an experience of the incomplete self, a miniature of a grander narrative now condensed and made available. 

Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2013) and a BFA from Wayne State University (2009). Her work has been exhibited internationally throughout Europe, Asia and the United States, most recently in the group exhibitions Present 23 at the Columbus Museum of Art, When The Sun Loses Its Light at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and My Secret Garden at Asia Art Center, Taipei. Satlowski has held solo exhibitions at Bel Ami, DM Office, Paris, ODD ARK and Embassy in Los Angeles, as well as Wasserman Projects in Detroit. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ICA Miami, the Columbus Museum of Art and X Museum, Beijing.