ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce In the Turn, a new installation by Lauren Edwards in Gallery Two.

Chicago, IL, November 16, 2013- ANDREW RAFACZ continues the fall 2013 season with In the Turn, new works by Lauren Edwards. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, January 11, 2014.

Working within a necessity of contrasting systems, Lauren Edwards uses photography and sculpture-based installation to question the relationships that exist between experience and perception. Her work considers the distance between reality and image, questioning authenticity and considering the extent to which photography can describe place.

In the Turn consists of staged walls, landscapes, and historical reenactment characters. In 1927, Paramount Pictures published a map displaying locations in California that resemble other places in the world. Making use of this suspended reality, Edwards sourced landscapes that resemble New England. Embedded, and framed by the false walls, these landscape images accurately represent one location, as they also depict a conceived New England. Also included are three photographs of medieval and colonial reenactors making bread in period costume. These characters, reliving a historicized moment, simultaneously exist in both the past and present.

Edwards’ work forces the viewer to consider the limits and thresholds of objects, and how we experience physical space throughout time. In the Turn suggests that our cultural history is malleable and subjective, much like our perceptions, and questions the value of simulation. It forces the viewer to consider how looking and miming position us in experience and narrativize history, and how these things change over time.

LAUREN EDWARDS (American, b. 1982) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Through an expanded lens of photography, Edwards uses various strategies including installation, projection, and sculpture to create framing devices that question the relationships between experience, perception, and representation. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Northeastern University in 2004 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013. She has exhibited in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York and was a recent participant at the Institut fur Alles Mogliche residency in Berlin, DE.