Join us for the on September 7th, 5-7pm, for the reception for Womb to Tomb, Birth to Earth, Dust to Dust: new works by Lauren Cardenas, in Gallery West of McKinley Arts & Culture Center.

In this series of prints and books, Cardenas pays homage to something that was lost – utilizing digital print along with traditional print methods to evoke a sense of longing and aloneness. She believes it is within the journey of seeking, that we are able to willingly lose ourselves in the excursion. When seeking something lost, one must go beyond ones contentedness toward uncharted territory, and be willing to understand that what one might be seeking is not the equivalent of what was lost. Lauren Cardenas is a longtime small-press book artist, and will be displaying printed publications alongside wall-hanging work.

Exhibition is open August 21 – October 6, with a gallery reception September 7, 5-7pm. Gallery West is located inside of McKinley Arts & Culture Center, 925 Riverside Drive. Free to the public.

“It seems that we do this quite obdurately, in the face of the hard and clear advice from psycho -analysis, which tells us that the quest is impossible, that what we are searching for is for a lost object, which really cannot be found. The object (the event, the happening, the story from the past) has been altered by the very search for it, by its time and duration: what has actually been lost can never be found. This not to say that nothing is found, but that thing is always something else, a creation of the search itself and the time the search took. […] The very search for what is lost and gone ( in an individual past or a public historical past) alters it, as it goes along, so that every search becomes an impossible one.”
Carolyn Steedman,
Dust: The Archive and Cultural History.