Bio
Jon Laustsen (he/him) is an artist and educator whose hand-built sculptures and installation-based artworks have reflected and responded to issues of transience and certainty for the past 20 years. His work materially builds on spatial, external, and internal perspectives while alternating between literal, metaphorical and suggestive connections across time. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and has created site-specific artworks for the Newark Arts Festival (Newark, NJ), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Beals Preserve (Southborough, MA), The David Winton Bell Gallery, The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology at Brown University, and the Project Space at AS220 (Providence, RI). Laustsen holds an MFA from The Rhode Island School of Design, a BA in Philosophy from Bethel University (MN) and is an adjunct instructor at the University of Rhode Island.
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