LAUREN'S XMAS SHOP at ARTX NYC

December 5 - 22, 2024

 

The holidays can be difficult when you’re alone. ArtX NYC presented Lauren’s Xmas Shop, a unique holiday experience which explored the artist’s innermost fears, anxieties and a nuanced understanding of sexuality shaped by trauma and disconnection. The last several years of living in New York have not been easy and Cohen had been celebrating the holidays on her own by obsessively drawing sets of cards and sculpting ornaments which all seem to elude to her inability to connect with others. When Covid arrived, she began setting up holiday booths on the side of the road in her neighborhood, but this year she moved indoors to the former Lotus nightclub. Steeped in its 90s - 2000s nostalgia, when Leonardo  DiCaprio and Prince would have been served drinks at the bar, this exhibition presented the ghosts from winter’s past.

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After experiencing the front of Lauren’s Xmas Shop, guests were invited into the defunct club kitchen where an immersive installation had been produced by the venue’s director, Phoenix Eisenberg. During the pandemic, both Lauren and Phoenix found the therapeutic qualities of sculpting and these were the first moments they revealed their creations. Works sat atop dusty stainless-steel countertops and in crusty pans that once cooked meals for patrons. Odd, anthropomorphized sculptures intermingled with floppy disks, VHS tapes and other evocative ephemera which felt like petrified reminders from another time and place. There was a comedy show called, "The Ghosts of Xmas Past" that took place at the venue on December 19th. 

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