Lauren Lavitt

The Last Draft of History

Finding materials in the everyday is not new to me. As a child I loved sweeping wet brick floors, discovering cut stems, wet foam bricks, tired newspapers, and lost petals--artifacts discarded at my family’s flower shop. These discoveries are the roots of my mixed media art practice. I began exploring art by experimenting with the detritus of the flower shop floor. Ever since my family closed the shop doors I’ve felt lost. I’m intrigued about what will be forgotten, archived, buried, and possibly dug up one day. “The Last Draft of History,'' examines that theme with the physicality of newspapers and the fleeting nature of flowers and information. I’ve taken different forms of the news and planted them in my backyard, froze, watered, painted, glued, dug them up, and dried them out to repurpose and merged them with my floral roots. In our current culture of convenience where everything is available at a click, I explore how we process information based on our tactile experiences with the objects that surround us.I’m fascinated by Birth, Love, and Death, the three core experiences of our lives. Flowers and the news represent and witness these three main life events. Working with flowers and the news was an opportunity to merge my relationships with the natural and unnatural worlds: Flowers that have been picked, packed, shipped, and cut; Newspaper that has been processed from trees, then printed, delivered, read, and (hopefully) recycled.