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Although the characters in Laurel
Hausler’s paintings are almost always dead or soon-to-be-dead,
her paintings are more poignant and cheeky than macabre. Death
is not so much scary for them as befuddling. Her characters
often seem surprised to find themselves on their side of the
divide, and many of them seem to have only themselves to blame
for it—like maybe they poked something with a stick that
shouldn’t have been poked. Rather than being threatening, they
seem sad, lost and in need of a hug. Think Charles Addams,
Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, not Wes Craven or Stephen King.
Hausler’s work is a product of her own attempts to demystify and
make less scary the thing that scares almost all of us the most.
Somewhere between the afterlife she was taught about in Catholic
school and the world inhabited by Hollywood’s zombies and
monsters, she has imagined a world of rather simple "living"
that seems more-or-less normal to those who are in it. They
almost make it seem like death is no big deal.
Hausler has focused recently on photography, documenting the
adventures of dolls that she has rescued from hobby shops and
eBay. She views these works as "painting with photographs," a
process that allows her to "look at the color and blur of the
final image as more of a fantastic scene than a snapshot." In
the new works, she places her heroines in worlds outside the
dollhouse—worlds that are as strange to them as the netherworld
is to us. She follows them as they trek through rain-soaked
forests and treacherous weed fields, bringing them to life with
her lens. The dolls look so vulnerable and innocent in these
strange surroundings that we feel human compassion for what are
obviously inanimate objects.
Laurel Hausler is self-taught. She lives and works as a
full-time artist in Northern Virginia, where she grew up, just
outside Washington, DC.
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| Faith Healers (2008) |
SOLD |
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| Water Witch (2008) |
40 x 30
mixed media on canvas |
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| The Moors (2008) |
SOLD |
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