Bio
Jon Laustsen is a visual artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice bridges sculpture, installation and DIY building processes, blurring artifactual-ness with abstract-invention. With both gravity and understated humor, his work tangles with disparate internal states and reaches outwardly toward long arcs of prehistory and post-futuristic dwellings, objects and fragments. Mixing earthen and common building materials with inner structures of bamboo, wood and steel, Laustsen’s work aims to give both intimate and expansive space to tenuous, ungraspable forms of suffering, deep contemplation and peace.
Laustsen has received numerous fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and recently won the Juror’s Choice Award at the 2024 National Prize Show hosted by the Cambridge Arts Association. His work has been exhibited by OVERLAP (Newport, RI), Art On The Trails (Southborough, MA), the Joukowsky Institute for Archeology at Brown University (Providence, RI) and the University of Rhode Island Project Space (Kingston, RI), as well as Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN) and AS220 (Providence, RI). He has been working, inventing and exhibiting since receiving his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) in 2002 and a BA in Philosophy in 1996 from Bethel University (St. Paul, MN).
Statement
The closer one gets to the core, the further they may seem from the surface.
My fascination with sculpture stems from a desire to delve deep beneath the surface and explore hidden structures that support and shape our world. The current body of work is suggestive of statuesque-like wind-turbines as culturally significant artifacts reflecting simultaneously a contemporary present and distant future. These re-imagined wind turbine forms, created with hand-applied concrete, plaster, foam, clay and paint, emerge from my practice as a repeating motif for embodying varying themes of loss, spirit, and time.
CV
Contact
Please email for any inquiries:
jonlaustsen@gmail.com