Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting

Conceived and designed for conversation, dialogue, study, and contemplation, Location Scouting is the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to re-imagine what a community space in the museum can be. Artist and curator Lauren Kelley reshapes the Tang Teaching Museum’s mezzanine by combining meditations on travel with snapshots of everyday life in her drawings, sculpture, and stop-motion animation videos. Using plasticine, toys, and souvenirs, Kelley’s videos conjure worlds that are malleable and unfixed, inhabited by robust protagonists whose quirks stem from efforts to correct the asymmetrical relationships they encounter. Accentuating the off-kilter, Location Scouting speaks to the shifts and rifts inherent in navigating today’s post-pandemic landscape.

The installation is also the setting for a series of transformations over time, created in collaboration with sculptor Margarita Cabrera, animator Jennifer Levonian, and performance artist Autumn Knight. Each guest artist’s interest in place, narrative, and audience will inform the direction of a new stop-motion animation produced collaboratively by Kelley and Skidmore College students to be screened during the last months of the show.