Lauren Comito & Sarah Pater

Projekt722 is pleased to present “Nothing / Will Have Taken Place / but the Place”, a show of work by Lauren Comito and Sarah Pater. The exhibition takes its title from Marllarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice, in which the “nothing” moment before the die is cast is charged with meaning—empty spaces between words evoke silence and achieve abstraction.

The work of Lauren Comito and Sarah Pater investigates places of solitude. Both Comito and Pater explore day-to-day life, containment, and archiving in different ways.

In Comito’s Container Series, collected containers from food and everyday goods purchased over the course of one year lead to several related bodies of work. In one phase of the project, Comito made plaster casts of each container to make “solid blanks”, which give form to the negative space from within each vessel. In her Everyday Color Sample project, Comito combines photos of places she has lived (Providence, Philadelphia, Brooklyn) layered with flattened packaging containers that she associates with these places. Color is determined digitally using Photoshop to create color samples derived from her personal photo archive of these spaces. Using her own internal logic, Comito creates an inventive form of representation by combining everyday moments and ordinary objects to discover new psychological implications of the commonplace.

Pater documents the quotidian experience of everyday spaces using the language of reductive painting and repetition. She catalogues and extracts solitary moments from her office environments, such as a series of aloe plants near a window meant to “soothe” the worker. Two large paintings depict ominous shadows cast by plants on walls in evening light. The peaceful solitude initially suggested by the paintings is offset by a sense of stifling confinement. Artist Jackie Gendel writes: “Pater’s subtly humorous subject is the strange spatial absence found at the intersection of office space and office time; where the question of utility is fraught with the anxieties of ‘spending’ and ‘wasting’, as opposed to the reverie of ‘passing’ time and ‘traversing’ space.”