Lauren Michelle Peterson, Can’t see the forest for the trees
Exhibition • October 10–November 7, 2026
Gallery Hours
Saturday October 10, 11am-3pm
Saturday October 17, 11am-5pm — LIT Fest
Saturday October 24, 11am-3pm
Saturday October 31, 11am-3pm
Friday November 6, 6-9pm — First Friday Reception
Saturday November 7, 11am-3pm — Last Look
Lauren Michelle Peterson is an artist-philosopher, curatorial collaborator, and educator. Working primarily with found objects, her practice involves excavating edges and transitional spaces through materiality and process via drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, or performance. Her current research uses a spatiotemporal lens to ask about the differences between human and nonhuman consciousness. Since earning her MFA in 2015, Peterson has served as the Studio Coordinator of Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and held faculty positions at Georgia State University and Valdosta State University. Peterson was named a 2019/20 Aspen Art Museum Fellow and her work was included in New American Paintings 150 and Caddisfly Project Vol. 4. Recent solo exhibitions include middle ground at Charles Adams Studio Project and Monolith with Still Life at Still Life with Fruit Gallery. Peterson has participated in group exhibitions at Vox Populi, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Spartanburg Art Museum, the GAIA Center in Athens, Greece, and the Zuckerman Museum. She has been an artist in residence at Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Jentel Foundation. Recent curatorial projects include Garage Projects, a local DIY space for creative interdisciplinary experimentation, in Lubbock, TX. Her work is part of the permanent collection of Goya Contemporary and the High Museum of Art. Peterson is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Art at Texas Tech University.
Artist’s Statement
My work is broadly about the relationship between representation and materiality. I am interested in how human-created knowledge systems frame reality and the mechanisms of framing and measuring. Can’t see the forest for the trees is a site-specific installation that thinks about how the discreteness of objects is produced through relational perceptions. I was attracted to the title phrase because of my obsession with how one thing turns into another. The installation makes use of found and natural objects that have been collected over time and are continually repurposed.
Collecting objects is a central aspect of my practice: a survey of the places, interactions, and economies I inhabit. Working with devalued objects allows me to question the lifespans of objects beyond a human time scale, how objects orient a sense of self, and how objects form shifting ambiguous networks of value and purpose. Being unable to see the forest for the trees additionally felt like an apt metaphor for our current political climate where renewed identity politics, culture wars, and media echochambers prevent collective cooperation towards shared goals. When do individuals become collectives, affecting change at a scale beyond them?
The installation plays with the aesthetics of calibration devices and scientific optical illusions to question how methods of measurement and perception may be altered to produce alternative frameworks. How small bits of matter accumulate and produce complexity can be thought about as a matter of scale where our proximity, spatial location, and vantage point contribute to how we understand the people, places, and things that make up our lifeworlds. At the smallest known level of the universe classical physics no longer applies. Matter can act as a particle or wave and a particle can exist in multiple places and states simultaneously. The relationship between the quantum level and the one we experience is not wholly understood. At what point do particles become the atoms that organize into the cells that make up the trees of a forest? Where are these boundaries and who draws them?