LAURIE OXENFORD
FORCES OF PRODUCTION

4 – 19 September, 2021

OPENING EVENT
Saturday 4 September, 4-7pm
LAURIE’s studio in the mezzanine will also be open for viewing

Accompanying piece of paper (also available digitally) by REBECCA ROSS

FORCES OF PRODUCTION is a site-specific series of experiments investigating The WALLS Art Space, and by extension the public spaces of Miami. Over the residency period through a series of interventions and contextual habits, the artist explored the on-site gallery storeroom and the local urban landscape to collect found materials, objects and digital documentation/s that reference (formal and informal) urban systems and flows. Through a walking practice the artist intentionally and critically disrupted different places to reveal the *truth/s* of public space.

The presence of surveillance and community observation meant that process became a spectacle and performance in itself, raising questions about self-censorship and authority. The artist’s methodology looks to other roadside and street practices that are essential to the spatial nature of public space (formal and informal) such as roadworks, construction, skating, maintenance, safety and traffic control etc.

Employing techniques of documentation, reorganisation, collection, installation, alteration and deconstruction, the artist offers new spatial assemblages that reimagine an object’s agency, context and functional potentials.

LAURIE OXENFORD completed Bachelor of Creative Arts (Spatial Construction) at the University of Southern Queensland before being awarded the Bellmaine French Appreciation Travelling Scholarship (2018). She then completed a Professional Attachment with the City of Gold Coast (2019) and Art-Work Agency. Laurie exhibited her fourth solo exhibition ‘Implied’ at The Third Quarter Gallery, Brisbane (2020) and was recently commissioned by the Home of the Arts (HOTA), Gold Coast to realise a site-specific wall painting. She is currently working as the Public Art Officer at Art-Work Agency and was previously the Lead Curator at First Coat Studios, Toowoomba (2018-19). Laurie is a part of the Generate GC program and works as a producer with Murals for Change.