Laur P

The current pictorial and sculptural practice of Laur P anticipates future fossils and material aggregates through pictorial abstraction and anarchival research.
 Working from a queer, trans, and crip perspective, he imagines, through painting and intuitive processes of material transformation, spaces where bodies and materials interact and transform, manifesting states of provisional precarity and subversion. Through processes of fragmentation and (re-)assemblage, Laur P seeks ambiguous forms of reappearance that trouble dualisms such as body/environment, presence/absence, living/non-living, and figure/ground.

At the core of his pictorial practice lies a concept he has named the “pictorial fossil” — a non- image-centered pictorial state that results from gestures of burial and excavation. For Laur P, the figure of the fossil has, over the years, become the focal point of his conceptual approach, through which he reflects on notions such as the Anthropocene, extinction, monstrosity, haunting, as well as queer, trans, and crip embodiments. By approaching abstraction as a speculative, even geological, mode of vision, he uses painting to reveal traces and forms that escape humanist frameworks, particularly in relation to representation and perception.

Sculptural interventions enter into dialogue with the paintings, as material extensions. Laur P is interested in the anarchive, a non-conventional and ephemeral form of archive that focuses on objects without cultural value. The objects are often drawn from the everyday and belong to the world of waste. In Laur P’s thinking, there is an intimate material relationship between waste as object and the experience of the rejected body. His works invite encounters with entities and relationships that are simultaneously microscopic and planetary, subterranean and topographical, as well as ancient and future. Attentive to the agential force of materials, he privileges processes in which matter itself collaborates in the production of meaning and form.

Situated within feminist materialist, critical posthumanist perspectives, as well as approaches informed by queer/trans studies and critical disability studies, Laur P’s assemblages challenge speciesist conceptions of evolution and nature, disrupt pictorial conventions and the tradition of landscape as a space for humanist representation of nature, destabilize ableist pictorial expectations, and therefore resist anthropocentric myopia. Through biomorphic and stratified compositions, his work proposes other ways of imagining present and future socio- and ecogeological entanglements.

Laur P (b. 1990) is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he also teaches painting. His doctoral research focuses on painting as a posthumanist practice. He holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Guelph (2021) as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Great Distinction from Concordia University (2015). Throughout his academic career, he has received several distinctions, including the Joseph- Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, University of Guelph) and the Betty Goodwin Prize in Visual Arts (Concordia University). His work has also received support from the Canada Council for the Arts. His work has recently been presented in Quebec (Galerie Nicolas Robert, Espace Transmission, Livart, AXENÉO7, Manif d’art 10), in Ontario (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, the plumb, Birch Contemporary), and in New York (Springs Projects, NADA, Sargent’s Daughters). Laur P’s works are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the City of Laval art collection, as well as Desjardins, Hydro-Québec, the Royal Bank of Canada, and Medcan, among others. He has been represented by Galerie Nicolas Robert since 2018.

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