Laura Curry
November - December 2021
Salon Event: December 31st
Gather Here
The artist was in-residence for six weeks. Her project situated neighborhood participants as artist collaborators, leaders, and framers.
Block by block, house by house, bike by bike, conversational engagements laid the groundwork for a dynamic room sized cartography grown from the narratives of neighborhood participants, Indigenous Peoples of the region, and ancestral memories knitting history to memory to geography to landscape to language.
Community and neighborhood events kicked off Gather Here, while the many neighborhood- based collaborative projects hosted by Yes We Cannibal continue. During the residency, her live and pre-recorded conversations explored histories and experiences of place, severing as testimonials to demarcate time and landscape.
BIO
Laura Curry’s projects develop from issues that affect the community where Curry lives and works. This community may be global, localized, political, or gendered, since the space that each project occupies includes, with it, multiple, diverse, socially specific narratives. This practice has led Curry into inquiries about radical methods of research, social engagement, and activism in the public domain. The opportunity to re-invent the iterative process of art making by engaging the social context where the art is conceptualized and produced, captivates Curry, and leads toward new thinking.
Since 2012 Laura Curry has been using a bicycle to conduct a research-based practice titled Citaen Bici / Bike Date to examine urban mobility as an embodied experience, discussing how transportation maintains environmental and mobility injustices. Curry examines how these injustices exclude queer and feminist perspectives and their bodies as part of an ongoing unjust system that Curry refers to as intersectional, regarding gender, racism, classism, ableism, nativism, anthropocentrism, and age. Curry argues that environmental justice can only be achieved with mobility justice and that to achieve mobility justice we need to queer the city. To queer a city is when transparency mechanisms, gender and BIPOC perspectives and embodied experiences are the norm, and when aspirational thinking includes a post carbon, fully sustainable and economically equitable city.
Curry returned to Monterrey Mexico to continue this research with CIESAS Noreste, in January 2022.
Laura Curry acknowledges the indigenous history of Baton Rouge, and more broadly Louisiana as a responsibility to acknowledge, honor and affirm indigenous culture, history, and experiences. Curry is committed to creating and maintaining a living and learning environment through her work that embraces individual difference, including the indigenous peoples of the region wherever she resides.
Collaborators included: Roni Bourgeois, Hal Lambert, Jean Lewis, John Lewis, Ben Livingston, Jeffrey Livingston, Sholonda, and many others.
Pricing and further documentation available on request. Contact gallery@yeswecannibal.org. All work is copyright of the artist(s) 2021/2022.
