Laura Berger
By Laura Smith @laura_ashley @curatingthewall
We’d all like to believe that time stands still when it comes to art. Your insides melt and succumb to the profundity of stillness in motion, a time captured and frozen before your eyes. But, that’s simply not true, time is a product of art, it’s manipulated and solicited to manifest charge and state obviousness in an inescapable continuum.
Laura Berger is such an artist that uses her art to induce time with movement, inserting the reality of the moment with playful innocence and connection to optimism. Her fem-centric work is curious and whimsical, a type of voice that is calming and easy to listen too, all while delicately commenting on female cultural idioms and society ideals.
With a background in theatre performance and a minor in design, Berger followed a tumultuous, however optimistic, path to painting. Berger initiated her paintings as a personal journey to connection, connecting her to a positive movement of time and openly engaging with that progress. Time is said to heal, how we move through that time is pivotal to our perspective on healing and the different forms in which it takes. This expression in time is also important to the staging of theatre, it’s not just about the performance of an individual, but timing, timing is everything; theatre is truly the act of time management to create transformation.
We can see the effect of this understanding in the individual, strong, flexible, independent, connected, audacious women whom are expertly arranged in engagements that leave no sense of loss or unbalance; like a conversation that has come full circle, completed in it’s reference to it’s beginning, such is the ease with which Laura Berger delivers her little animations with big personalities.
This sense of balance and serenity is her gift to those in the audience who show up to her work in their own state of unrest or uncertainty. She says, “It helps to reinforce a sense of calm and to physically envision a peaceful world where we are all honoring our connectedness and just hanging out together in a place of total ease.”
In this day-in-age it is not so easy to envision a peaceful world where we find faith and unity. However, art can do that for us, transporting us to places of wonder and calm. Laura Berger so innocently takes us through the struggles, bravely inserts us up against the challenges we face, but does so using community, reminding us we are not alone and not without optimism.
The charming aura of each woman who is intimately adjoined another in dainty sculptural vignettes radiates energetically love, peace, understanding and most importantly hope. What is so profoundly laid in the subtle lining of Berger’s compositions is that as time eloquently passes, the most important thing to have is hope. Pursuing healing is to activate a faith in time, call upon those who will brave life with you and trust the process. Laura Berger’s concerts of empowered women deliver rare, important narrative of feminine connection and our personal relationship to nurturing meaningful time using the fluidity of nature, value of ceremony, and celebration through ritual.
Laura Berger is currently based in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She recently exhibited her work at The Athen B. Gallery in Oakland, CA in a co-exhibition called Nobody, Everybody. Here she showed both her miniature ceramic sculptures and a variety of dynamic paintings made on wood panels using acrylic and acrylic gouache. If you didn’t happen upon her show in Oakland, just dance your way to the homepage of her personal website, instantly you will get a sense of the spirituality in her work.
Also, you can find an intimate invitation to her imagination on her tumblr blog, in which she delivers sweet snapshots of her creative process. The loveable lady of her paintings is there to greet you with deep breaths and a contagious smile. Captured by Berger? You can find a shop on her personal website and on Etsy, including prints, cards, paintings and pins, but don’t retreat too early; the playful animations transporting the beauty of the feminine spirit to your screen are a must.
