Laura Josephine Snyder

Tending

February 2 - March 22, 2024 at Second Street Galley, Charlottesville, VA

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The imagery in the work in this exhibition is drawn from charts of ocean currents and a guide to weather symbols used for maritime navigation I encountered while at an artist residency in the Penedès region of Catalunya, Spain in 2018. These symbols conform an abstract language which I reference and transform through material-driven process.

Reminiscent of written language, the rhythmic mark-making in my work carries the memory of the movement of my hand across the page or panel, the lines shifting from dark to light as the paintbrush leaves its trace. Bright or contrasting colors on grounds of earth pigment serve as beacons or signs and punctuate the continuous rhythmic flow present in my larger, meditative pieces.

The Traveling Drawings can be folded and unfolded like road maps as I work on them, creating creases and wear on the paper. In referencing maps, I point to the history of cartography and counter cartographies, and I ask how moving through spaces or knowing places changes the traveler. The drawings begin as two stenciled lines, mirror images of one another. I slowly build up the drawings one parallel line after the next, until the undulating lines join and overlap. This meeting of the two sides of the drawings often brings unexpected consequences, including a moiré pattern. The effect, caused by overlapping two sets of slightly different parallel lines, speaks to the Surrealist notion of a “third mind” or a “third memory,” created in the space between an event and its retelling.

In the Postcards series, I explore the functioning of memory through screen-printing hand-drawn stencils over photographs from my personal archive, partially obscuring the images underneath.

I created each 9 x 12” watercolor in Tending as a single gesture followed by a series of painted lines reverberating or echoing outward in consequence. Over the course of six months, the work became a thread of belonging linking disparate places and experiences. These gestures reference the current charts I had encountered, which divide an ocean map of the into quadrants, each containing a small mark whose weight and shape expresses the median of ten years’ worth of information (memory) and can be consulted years later for navigation.

At the end of the year I arranged the separate pieces, like letters in an alphabet, to create one large work. In the photo and video documentation by Kristen Finn, the relationships between the painted shapes on the pages and the body shapes created in the process of arranging them are made visible. The final work contains a seemingly unlimited number of possible future iterations and invites the viewer to imagine them.

Tending refers to the small gestures or movements we make that lead us toward our individual and collective futures. By referencing the slow-moving cycles present in the natural world and a symbolic language that describes them, I engage with place and open-up space for new patterns of thought and movement to emerge.

Yellow Ochre, Red Clay

March 5th- April 2nd 2021 at Studio IX, Charlottesville, Virginia

This exhibition is a meditation on two pigments, yellow ochre found in the yard around my current place of residence and red iron oxide, the pigment that gives swaths of earth a deep red color in Virginia and elsewhere. These two pigments are essentially variations on iron-rich rocks that have been used since the beginning of human history to communicate, to signal, long before complex language was formed. Red iron oxide derives it color from the mineral hematite, whose name is derived from the ancient Greek word hema, meaning blood.

The focus on two ochre pigments in this series of watercolors allows me to explore the potency found in the conversations between elemental geometric forms. The colors and shapes in these pieces speak to the body and sensuality, as well as the architectural forms of doorways and arches. This past year has seen me exploring and rooting into an expanded idea of home like never before, one encompassing the earth, plants and nature’s cycles as they unfold around me. The body, vessel, and home are symbolically revealed through these works.

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Emotional Architecture

October, 2019

Angelo Jewelry, Charlottesville

This exhibition explores the relationships between outward and inward experience. Architectural space is referenced through geometric forms and emotions are remembered through the use of color. This group of works on paper considers the possibility of an architecture of emotion as well as the emotional effects of space on the human body.

Field Notes

May 2017

The Garage, Charlottesville, Virginia

This collection of works on paper spans two years, and though many things have happened in between, they speak the same language. In one sense these drawings are a conversation between two places: Mazunte, Oaxaca and Charlottesville, Virginia. Despite (because of) this awareness of place, the territory surveyed and explored in this work is that of interiority.

 The process of creating these drawings mirrors and makes visible the process of cognition. The drawings themselves speak the language of perception, experience, memory and movement. 

 The results of this inquiry elicit a breaking-down of visual language and are to be perceived in the resonance of color, the texture of shape and the sensibility of line locked in tense yet delicate conversation on each page. These works dwell somewhere in the nebulous realm between concept and object, instilling the object (paper) with shifting concepts.

 In turning their attention to the deliberate mark-making in these drawings the viewer may find their own pulse slowed, perhaps sense the passage from one shape to another or catch a whiff of the way one color sings to the next.

Souvenir

July 2014

WVTF Radio IQ Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia

The Blue of Distance is a series incorporating found maps. The blue lines of these drawings are a meditation on place, cartography, journeys, and yet they obscure the maps beneath them, much as the imagination needed to relate a memory in words or images transforms the remembered moment.

The Blue of Distance es una serie que incorpora mapas encontrados. Las líneas azules de estos dibujos son una meditación acerca del concepto de un lugar, la cartografía, los viajes, y sin embargo tapan los mapas que están debajo, así como la imaginación necesaria para relatar una memoria por medio de palabras o imagines transforma el momento recordado.

Búsqueda de tesoro

June 2012

19 o Así Pulmones, MUCA Roma, Mexico City, Mexico

There were four of us, plus two cell phones, a tablet and an umbrella. We left when the sun was at its hottest. In the street all of the surfaces reflected the sun, the screens reflected the sun, and our eyes watered. In spite of this, and after a brief period of experimentation and acrobatics, we began to take the photographs.

This piece searches for a "true" image between screens. It begins in Bogotá, where I explored Mexico City, specifically the Roma neighborhood through Google Maps Street View. After three years in Mexico City I was surprised how quickly I forgot names and places. My mental map was slowly replaced by the virtual one- with its promises of accurate representation of space- a deceptive promise.

The virtual exploration of Google Maps became a treasure hunt- a search for moments or images that stood out- people who were looking at the camera, strange situations, buildings that had changed drastically or not at all. Like any good tourist, a took photographs of my treasures, re-freezing the frozen moment captured by Google Maps.

I travelled to Mexico and we went out onto the streets and walked the physical and virtual routes simultaneously. First it was necessary to search for the location of each photograph taken in Street View and then position ourselves in that spot and take the photographs. The internet was slower than our footsteps, the cell phones heated up and lost their charge. Meanwhile, in the real world, the sun, so aggressive at midday, began its descent, generating in the photographs from that day the notion of time passing, beyond the contrasts between the real and virtual photographs that show some of the changes taking place in the area and the impossibility of arriving at a true image. (Action, photographic series, 2012. Published in 19 or so Lungs, Enlivening interventions in the Public Space, Illustrated catalogue of the outside show organized by the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte Roma, March-June 2012)

Éramos cuatro, más dos celulares, un tablet y un paraguas. Salimos a la hora más soleada del día. En la calle todas las superficies brillaban, las pantallas brillaban y los ojos ardían, sin embargo, después de un periodo de experimentación y acrobacia, empezamos a tomar las fotografías.

Esta pieza busca una imagen “verdadera” entre pantallas. Em- pieza en Bogotá, donde recorría el D.F. y en particular la Roma por medio de Google Maps Street View. Después de tres años en el D.F. me sorprendió la velocidad con la que se me iban olvidando los nombres y los lugares. La cartografía de mi memoria se vio poco a poco remplazada por el mapa virtual con su promesa de representación fiel de la realidad, promesa engañosa.

El recorrido virtual por Google Maps se volvió una búsqueda de tesoros, de momentos o imágenes que me llamaban la atención - personas que miraban a la cámara, situaciones extrañas, edificios que habían cambiado mucho, o poco. Como todo buen turista, sacaba fotos de mis tesoros, congelé de nuevo el momento congelado del Google Maps.

Viajé a México y salimos a la calle a recorrer el recorrido virtual y el recorrido real al mismo tiempo. Primero había que buscar el lugar de cada foto en Google Maps y después posicionarnos en el lugar real y sacar fotos. El internet iba mas lento que los pies, se calentaban los celulares y se descargaban. Mientras, en el mundo real, la luz, que molestaba a medio día por su intensidad, iba desapareciendo, generando en las fotos de ese día una noción del paso del tiempo mas allá de los contrastes entre las fotos reales y virtuales que evidencian algunos de los cambios que han ocurrido en la zona y dan cuenta de la imposibilidad de una imagen verdadera. (acción, sere de fotografías, 2012)

Tea Time (topografías interiores)

2011

In Paraísos Perdidos, esta inmensa burrada

La Miscelánea, México, DF

Galería 904, Mérida, Yucatán, México

Galería MIAMI, Bogotá Colombia

Mediante estrategias de instalación, montaje y gráfica expandida, traza una crítica a la incorporación del consumo del té como costumbre y tradición que atraviesa prácticas coloniales, procesos de producción y distribución alto capitalista, así como la construcción ideológica del consumo del mismo como una isla o paraíso de la cotidianidad. La pieza consiste en una instalación de diferentes formatos, que tienen como línea procesual la generación de dibujos por la bolsa de té que evidencia un frenético proceso de resguardo del residuo. (Texto por El Mal Salvaje y La sociedad de los perros, 2011)

Through installation, expanded drawing and assemblage, the piece traces a critique of the incorporation of the consumption of tea as a custom and tradition that transverses colonial practices, capitalist processes of production and distribution as well as the ideological construction of the consumption of tea as an island o paradise within the day to day. The piece consists of an installation in various formats, the central process involves using tea bags to create drawings that serve as evidence of a frenetic process of the collection of residue. (Text by El Mal Salvaje y La Sociedad de los Perros, 2011 my translation)

Southern Gothic

November 2011

In the exhibition La Gran Enciclopedia Acémila. ASAB Galería, Bogotá, Colombia

Southern Gothic is made from the artist’s hair, shorn by Las Peluqueras Asesinas, and lace gloves purchased in the center of Bogotá in a store for communion outfits and party favors. This piece speaks to our animal nature and the long history of it’s submission to societal norms and constructs.