Clayton Skidmore’s brightly colored landscapes are riddled with malice. Rendered in watercolor, acrylic and dye, the velvety surfaces evoke vignettes of classic Little Golden Book illustrations of the 1940’s - 60’s. Whimsical veneers are pried back to reveal and deconstruct the perversity of “innocent” story book fantasies of Mid-Century America. The resulting landscapes depict a dark side of the natural world.
In Breadcrumbs, Skidmore brings together his recent series of tie-dyed canvases and previously unexhibited watercolors on paper. Both bodies of work are scattered with his familiar vernacular of woodland creatures in tripped-out landscapes.

In a nod to classic t-shirt craft, the tie-dyed canvases provide a visually compelling ground for overlayed landscapes, aesthetically swaying between old foxed paper and psychedelic portals. The accompanying watercolors mark a starting point for uncanny anthropomorphized trees and transgressive interactions between characters and their surroundings.

Lauren Powell Projects is excited to present Cute Gloom, a group show examining the harmonies and tensions between the aesthetic category of cute and its counterpart gloom. Initially conceived in collaboration with featured artist Benjamin Cabral, the project grew to include work by 40 artists. The 80 pieces remind us of the utility cuteness can possess in difficult times, from providing a source of comfort and self-soothing to serving as a visual language to convey needs, wounds, fears, and even anger. When faced with a world of gloom, what can cute do for us? - text by Elise Cabral

Clayton Skidmore is having a Plant Sale, and you’re invited. For three weeks, he’s transforming Life Lessons Garage into a plant shop, filled with his paintings of brightly colored, cartoonish, and apocalyptic plants. Like a supersized pop-up book brought to life, the space will be overtaken with cut-out plywood paintings, surrounded by large-scale canvas murals attached to the walls.

Skidmore explores the relationship between houseplants and paintings, both often brought into domestic spaces to act as windows into other worlds outside. He’s interested in paintings and plants as props—objects positioned to provide support for things they’re not actually a part of. Like theater flats, both in construction and function, his three-dimensional paintings highlight the tenuous relationship between fantasy and reality. They exploit the fragility of the seams between belief and truth.

Through bleeding washes of color that simultaneously establish form while melting it away, Skidmore takes you to the seams between worlds—between dimensions and perspectives, the post-apocalyptic and the hopeful, between that “much needed” hip new plant shop in a gentrifying neighborhood, and a giant diorama of an erie garden, chopped up and rearranged. His shop blends the idealism of Little Golden Books with the horror of Black Mirror, creating a disorienting 21st century retail experience.

Please join us for the grand opening of Plant Sale, and come prepared to sever your own piece of the installation to take home and plant in your world.

“Landing thus requires a particular state of mind, one where intuitions and impressions prevail, where one feels before one thinks, where one moves across and stalks around before seeking full disclosure and understanding.”
-Christophe Girot, Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture

Landing, a show of ten artists and ten works, takes place in a former Catholic convent in Hell’s Kitchen. Alongside the desks, beds, and traces that the nuns left behind, these works sit in self-reflection. They contain the histories of hours spent in the studio with private thoughts, doubts, and meditations, until landing on something that needs to be pushed out into the world. They start a conversation between preconception and reality.

Each work exists alone in a bedroom. The dividing walls are buffers. Rituals and doubts are witnessed in singular devotion. The furniture reinforces the functionality of a meditative space. Take a moment with the work. Sit with it for a second. Move onto the next room at your own pace. Landing is the initial step toward understanding.

CLEANING HOUSE by Dallas native, CLAYTON SKIDMORE depicts architectural structures with scale models. His miniatures represent a metaphysical realm where the fantasy of building and destroying institutions can be perceived. Skidmore uses Homeland Security as an example of the anti-authoritarian interpretation of the domestic space as an institution. The attitude of asserting Living With Art as opposed to Going to See Art collapses and inspires the work in CLEANING HOUSE.

CLEANING HOUSE consists of a video projection of “Thru Albers to Richter” in the front room, a film shoot of a burning model of Homeland Security in the backyard, and a video feed of the footage playing on the bedroom television. CLEANING HOUSE represents both a cleansing sacrificial act and a violation, Skidmore along with Homeland Security houses questions of cultural inheritance and the role personal places play under the weight of public organizations.