Laura Soto

Museum as Retail Space (MaRS) is pleased to present Flesh and Flood by Laura Soto. The exhibition shows alchemical amalgams of various scale.

Exhibition Text by Robert Zin Stark:

Invoking the body through evoking atemporal delicacies - honey, syrup, and cake as unitive of past, present, and future - Laura Soto's work might be looked at as both an extension, as well as antithetical, to the ideas of Romanticism. We return to subjectivity, but not the individual; rather, an animism of a communal body - the ocean from which our subjective power rises.

Lustily

I dipped my oars into the silent lake,

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan;

When, from behind that craggy steep till then

The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,

And through the silent water stole my way

Back to the covert of the willow tree;

There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—

And through the meadows homeward went, in grave

And serious mood; but after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion.

~ Wordsworth

Biography:

Laura Soto | b. 1991 • San Diego, California

Biola University | BS, Studio Art • La Mirada, CA

Laura Soto is a mixed media sculptor living and working in Southern California. She has shown at Leiminspace in Chinatown, Los Angeles (This Never Happened, 2015 & Few and Far Between, 2016), in 2016 she contributed to MaRS Gallery's Obscured and Objectified gallery shop, Corrupted Ceramics group show with Galleria Salvatore Lanteri, and MAS Attack at the Torrance Art Museum. Her most recent exhibition was ExtraTerrestrial with Galleria Salvatore Lanteri May 20 – June 24th 2017. She explores the vulnerability and poetics of material through a variety of processes. Her practice centers mainly on large forms built of fiber that transform under the weight of media amassed.