Laura Cowley
artist statement
I make digital work and am interested in finding ways to bring that work into the physical world. I make videos for projection in hypnotic loops. They are evasions of closure, denials of decay, and highly authored, repeated moments. I highlight a tension between the natural and forms reproduced by technology, engaging with the panic surrounding the machine’s potential to eliminate labor. While we might all one day be useless, I address a frustration with the centering of people’s potential to work as being inextricable from their worth. The Union for the Useless asks whether, by embracing a maligned identity, rather than distancing ourselves from it, some kind of community- and self-acceptance might be found. Let's laugh over and at the abyss of horror. The lens of projection through which I operate is distorted (or perhaps clarified) by the experience of disability.