Lauren Anderson:
Setup

Lauren Anderson, *Stand (*2025). Ceramics, hemlock, stain, 52 x 120 x 36 inches. Photo: David Schulze

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River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to present Setup, new commissioned works by Lauren Anderson installed within the landscape that surrounds the Al Held Foundation studio complex. The project is curated by Marisa Espe and organized as part of RVAC’s annual On the Grounds series.

Anderson’s work investigates the formal properties of vernacular images, objects, and methods of presentation. With Setup, she extends her material experimentations in wood and clay into the outdoors. Drawing from the visual vocabulary of roadside structures encountered while driving throughout the Hudson Valley, Anderson constructs forms that echo makeshift farm stands, produce containers, abandoned palettes, and free piles. She considers the sites and circumstances these everyday objects occupy, examining their logics of display and the ways they integrate or contrast with the natural landscape. Anderson engages techniques of casting, projecting, deconstructing, and reconstructing to create new associations between the utilitarian, the provisional, and the handmade.

Setup is comprised of three sculptural works that are installed in three distinctive locations, activating throughways and tucked-away corners of the Foundation’s property. Further drawing on the design of the outdoor site—the discreet paths between buildings, the gently winding switchbacks up the slope, the calm of a level grade—the artist invites visitors to reorient with the space and scale of the grounds. Like the roadside farmstand, Anderson’s works punctuate enough to catch the eye yet remain approachable and human scaled.

Structures of weather treated wood function as the base and support for ceramic compositions, including casts of waxed cardboard boxes and novelty baskets, clay slabs, and ceramic offshoots and tests. Anderson’s process-driven recipes for firing and glazing yield visual delights that either augment the trompe l’oeil effect or strike dissonance between form, surface, and palette. The constituent parts can be understood as representatives—elements that stand in for something, but are not the things themselves, elements that sometimes just surpass the threshold of abstraction to perplex viewers in their uncanniness. As the exhibition title suggests, setup connotes both an arrangement and a scheme, both the way something is organized and how it has been designed to deceive. Anderson’s work revels in the space between recognition in the referent and the defamiliarization through process.

LAUREN ANDERSON (b. 1983 Portsmouth, VA) works in expanded notions of painting and sculpture. She is observant in how perspectives are established, how objects, ideas, and images get from Point A to Point B, and the scope of forms, substrates, and portals that get them there. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include The Middle Ages, Roundabouts Now, Kingston NY (2025); 48 Hour Biography, Paradise Projects, Philadelphia, PA (2024); Talk Shop, VERSE Workshop, Red Hook, NY (2023); The First Show, CooCoo Barn, Hudson, NY (2020); Lax Attitude, AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles, CA (2018); among others. She has been awarded fellowships at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson) and Ox-Bow (MI). Anderson graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Printmaking and received an MFA in Painting from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently an Artist-In-Residence at Bard College and lives and works in Kingston, NY.

Over the past five years, River Valley Arts Collective has partnered with the Al Held Foundation to present exhibitions in Held’s former drawing studio, outdoor installations on the foundation's grounds and, more recently, performances in Held’s painting studio.