Wishes & Regrets
The extraordinary art of Lauren Gillette
by Sarah Bouchard
Entering Lauren Gillette’s home studio in a refurbished beach house in York is like stepping inside her mind. It’s an eccentric, sexy, brilliant space. Every surface vibrates with color, text and personality. A mural covers a wall by the entrance; other walls are hidden behind floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. Newspaper clippings and more stacks of books with dog-eared pages pile on tabletops. A central table boasts a large planter overflowing with succulents, coral, and purple barnacles, topped by a small sculpture of Botticelli’s Venus. A quote from Grace Metalious’ once scandalous 1956 novel about a small New England town, Peyton Place, is stenciled in black letters on the back of a white chair: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.”
When we met at her studio this winter, Gillette was working on a new series exploring the elements: air, earth, water and fire. She’d been collecting information — Gillette is always collecting information, making notes and jotting down phrases — and was researching ways to transfer text onto vessels representing each element. A large, tear-shaped, blue glass vessel (water) with notes tacked around it with blue tape sat by a window behind her. She mentioned her difficulties finding someone willing to help fabricate the piece, and the expense of materials. But Gillette works intuitively, and seems completely comfortable with the unknown. She’s also working on another new series, this one exploring color. An entire wall was covered with sheets of paper marked up with boxes and words associated with colors or color-related concepts. She compared it to a crazy person’s ramblings. Don’t be fooled: it looks like a genius at work.
Gillette’s most well-known series is The Jacket Project, works from which were displayed as part of Refashioned, an exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art, in 2011. The series has since grown to include 24 vintage leather jackets altered with painted and printed text and images, embroidery, and mixed-media applications. Each jacket is about a person or event of social significance. Subjects include transsexual pioneer Hedy Jo Star, a local Iraq War veteran named Jordan Kelley, Sammy Davis Jr., Ayn Rand, Sylvia Plath, and a Japanese-American family of nine, the Mochidas, who were held in an American internment camp during World War II.
Gillette’s background in graphic design is clearly evident. She studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, an art program founded on the Bauhaus concept of “learning how to learn” as a lifelong endeavor — a lesson Gillette has put to great use.
She began The Jacket Project by transforming one of her own jackets in between work on other projects. “I really wanted something that took a long time,” she said, “less doing, more thinking.” She got her wish. Each jacket takes many weeks or months of research and manual labor. The detail in the work is impeccable, with every surface considered and embellished.
The Keith Haring jacket explores the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when Gillette saw posters on the streets of Greenwich Village urging support for those stricken with “gay man’s cancer.” The lining of the jacket is a print of a subway map of Manhattan and the lapel buttons are tokens. Large red letters declaring “THE PARTY’S OVER” are painted beneath the map, along the waistband. Stitched interior pockets offer instructions for how to put on a condom, and there are condoms stuffed inside. The inside pocket on the opposite side is printed with tabloid headlines: “AIDS IS A C.I.A. PLOT,” “AIDS CAME FROM GREEN MONKEYS,” “HIV was created by Soviet scientists…” A folded red ribbon is pinned to this pocket.
On the jacket’s exterior, facts and figures about the advent of AIDS are intermingled with Haring-esque figures and quotes about the backlash caused in NYC when Haring’s graffiti first appeared all over town. A take on Haring’s iconic “Free South Africa” protest poster dominates the back, and beneath that is a hand-painted quote from the artist about living life to the fullest, even in the face of death. The jacket pulls together pivotal issues and influences from a particularly charged moment in time, providing a dense, coded work that rewards prolonged observation.
Gillette has realized an impressive series of visually compelling, conceptually driven works in other media, as well. The Following Sea, an interactive installation of glass-bottle assemblages with handwritten vellum tags, uses humor and metaphor to, as Gillette puts it, “get the conversation rolling on the shit storm that is illness and trauma.” The Scarlet Thread (a.k.a. “The ABCs of Sexual Shaming”) is an alphabetical series of handmade quilts that explores the many ways people have been scorned throughout history for their sexual expression (e.g., “G is for Groupie,” as in Mary Magdalene, who “sure loved her some Jesus.”)
Some of Gillette’s most moving projects are her most personal, like Veneer. Hearing a radio DJ use the word crumbum one morning brought forth memories of her late father “and his weird Medford Sinatra-speak,” prompting Gillette to finally find a use for 50 vintage wood-grained veneer samples she’d acquired 10 years before. Mounted on a wall, the samples (many embellished and modified by the artist) open on hinges to reveal snippets of her family’s story. Sand & Dirt transforms the collection of sand samples she and her daughter have amassed during their travels into what Gillette calls a “generational portrait, without the paint.”
Other notable series are interpersonal. For Things I Did, an ongoing project, Gillette finds participants through Craigslist and Facebook, asking respondents to describe their lives in five lines of text. She then etches these lines onto mirrors and installs them at odd angles, so viewers read the text amid a fractured image of themselves. (Things I Did will be on view this fall at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, New Hampshire.)
For a similar project, Wish/Regret, which is also ongoing, Gillette asks people to pose for two mug shots: one with a personal wish spelled out on the letter board, the other with a regret. When she started this series, inspired by a friend’s original idea, Gillette had low expectations, figuring most participants would come up with mundane, generic responses. But their revelations surprised her. “I’m slayed by how generous people are, and just by what they come up with,” she told me. Most of the participants were complete strangers, some of whom traveled a significant distance to her studio to share their intimate hopes and painful memories in the service of another’s art.
The DYMO Project also yielded surprising results. As Gillette recounts on her website (laurengillette.com), this series “started with a tacky old DYMO labeler” that she bought online for about $3. “As anyone who has ever had a labeler of any sort can tell you, the damn thing is addictive,” she wrote. “You want to label everything you can lay your hands on. … Hey, why not people? I liked the idea of people walking around with labels on their foreheads. Something short and sweet. … I started asking everyone I knew to describe themselves in a single thought. Then I’d whip out the DYMO, spell it out and take a picture.” Gillette anticipated she’d be making labels reading “Mother,” “Father,” “Indian Chief” — “You know,” she remarked, “gravestone descriptions.” But after the first five labels of the 100-person project, “I realized that no one was showing up with the gravestone stuff. Instead they were spelling out ‘Yes’ and ‘Tabula Rasa.’ ‘I AM GOD’ and ‘Don Quixote.’”
Through these interactive projects, Gillette has provided a platform for people to reflect and interact in uncommon ways. Today, we so often engage with one another through an electronic device, and we are rarely asked to share our inner reflections about who we are or what has real meaning in our lives. At this moment of speed and surface, Gillette is mining the depths.
“I am actually interested in what is going on with people in their heads and how they feel about things,” Gillette said. Her projects begin with the simplest seed of an idea, or an object, and spiral out to take in and absorb as many other people and concepts as they can. The strength of her work begins in that moment of chance, when she saddles an idea and rides it, not knowing where it will lead.
Lauren Gillette is currently accepting five-line Things I Did biographies to be featured in her upcoming show at the AVA Gallery. She also welcomes new participants for the Wish/Regret project and is seeking an intern or two. Contact: lulu329@maine.rr.com. Special thanks to Maura McEvoy for the image she contributed to this story. McEvoy is currently working on a photography book documenting the unique interiors of homes and other structures in Maine.
