The Bridge Gallery, Paris

Dale Lawrence

For Dale Lawrence’s solo show at Art-O-Rama, The Bridge Gallery brings together a body of work interrogating the instability of language and exploring how meaning is constructed in a society overwhelmed by social media and misinformation. For this purpose, each work presented has been created with reused and recontextualised material.

 

At the core are Lawrence’s text-based works, composed from fragments of clickbait articles, printed on paper and encapsulated in epoxy. The laminated prints highlight the elasticity of words, prompting us to reconsider their role in shaping our realities. Language is slowed, fractured, and recomposed. Its debris are transformed into objects of permanence, freezing what is otherwise fleeting. The resulting works operate as poems forged from remnants where words become mutable, ambiguous, and luminous, inviting the viewer to witness language itself as both material and music.

 

This logic extends into the display. Several works are mounted on wooden backing boards made from found furniture (side tables, stools, cabinets…) stripped of function and reduced to shallow wall plinths. The everyday origins of the source material find their spatial counterpart in these domestic remnants, now rendered unfamiliar.

 

On the floor, Nameless and Friendless, two wooden chairs from the artist’s studio face each other, awaiting an impossible dialogue. The legs of one, cut off, raise the other, yet both are left in untenable positions. The hierarchy is visible yet sterile as the elevation of one comes at the expense of both. Echoing the eponymous painting by Emily Mary Osborn (1857), the work reflects imbalanced power structures.

 

Suspended from the ceiling, a new audio work extends Lawrence’s practice of repurposing. He turns here to audio from home movies, transforming these intimate, everyday recordings into raw material for entirely new meaning. Composed of veldfire ash and cow fat, it incorporates audio transmitted directly through the surface via a distributed mode loudspeaker. In dialogue with Joseph Beuys, fat is not symbolic but a medium through which sound and matter co-produce experience.

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