Let These Pastel Still Lifes Give You Déjà Vu
Lead image: Vox Divina. All images courtesy of the artist.

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Let These Pastel Still Lifes Give You Déjà Vu

Through sculpture, illustration, and installation, artist Langdon Graves explores the complexities of human existence.

Take a deep dive into various notions of the human condition, particularly the intersection of the mind, the physical body, and systems of belief, in the work of intrepid philosopher-artist Langdon Graves. With a hyperrealistic style imbued with surrealist narratives, Graves' sculptures, installations, and drawings linger in your senses, gently prodding you for recognition. At once familiar and understated, her art evokes an exploration of your own histories in an attempt to grasp that feeling on the tip of your tongue. "I've always wanted my work to do for a viewer what certain songs do for me, or what the remnants of a dream tend to do throughout the day: to sneak in and seem at once familiar and curious, not quite namable. Or nameable, but not place-able," she tells Creators. "Like memories that have no actual past but just produce the sensation of remembering. Déjà vu."

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I didn't say it was possible, I only said it was true

Born with extra kidneys, Graves was first enamored by the concept of the physical body as a system when she underwent multiple surgeries as a child and began to examine her own body medically with a team of professionals. "I was super interested in how everything worked or didn't work," Graves recalls, "and even more interested in developing my own visual explanations for the things that weren't clear on my x-rays and scans." In her youth, Graves attended Catholic school and upon confirmation when she was, in her words, "made into a grown-up Catholic," the archbishop of her diocese committed suicide. "The whole system came crashing down for me," she says. But this distance allowed for exploration of yet another human system, that of belief. Graves has spent years examining the various philosophies of belief, from those of specific religions to those of psychology and physiology, such as neurotheology, a field that studies the brain on belief.

Animal Hypnosis

Seance (American Spirit)

From this early childhood fascination of systems grew a body of work anchored in surrealist visuals akin to those of Magritte. Graves repeats certain elements, such as hands, gloves, and eyes, because she considers them all "points from which we connect and communicate." Another distinct characteristic of her work is its rambunctious yet paradoxically subdued color palette. She often chooses pinks, peaches, yellows, turquoise, blues, and greens as a way of relating back to the body. "Pink and red are warning colors when generated by our bodies, but can also be confectionary and appealing," she explains. "Yellow can indicate an unhealthy pallor, pus, mucus (unhealthy humors), disease, but is also the color of light and youth." Color in her work is also very personalized, connected to her own life experiences with them. "I saw a lot of [these colors] in the children's hospital when I was growing up, as well. The blue-greens I'm drawn to are, to me, synthetic. Plastic, toothpaste, mid-century, cold war, institutions, hospitals."

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Graves draws influence not only from personal histories, but also from historical, cultural, and mythological texts. Her work is the product of wide-ranging research, compiled stories and perspectives, but it coalesces around the central, uniting narrative of human existence and the intrinsic systems that keep us alive.

Home Circle

10 Road North (detail)

Out of Body (detail)

In the Back of the Edge of Hearing

Light as a Feather Stiff as a Board

Light as a Feather Stiff as a Board (full)