represent

From a world long before Brooklyn . . .

Long long . . . in a land before Google

Lauren Purje, who shows at Viridian Artists and is just starting out—she shares a tiny Brooklyn apartment, sans kitchen, with two other artists, one of whom I wrote about not too long ago—has a show in December at Buffalo State University. Like the art festival in London I visited earlier this year, organized by two struggling young curators, this Buffalo show is brief. It goes up, runs a few days, then bam, it’ll be gone. It’s like that: before you know it you’re thinking, Did you guys have to leave so soon? But that’s the perfect mood for viewing Lauren’s work, which often features friendly cartoon dinosaurs, among many other haunting little line-drawn figures who cluster together for warmth or company or just the illusion of safety in a world that seems to have been evacuated overnight. (My take on Lauren is that if she could suddenly text a brontosaurus, her first words would probably be: Did you guys have to leave so soon?) Often, her scenes surround a little figure, with dots for eyes, whose no-nonsense outlines seem at odds with her romantically painted world. She’s dubious about what’s out there—and by out there, I mean in the neighborhood of Venus and Mars, not just Brooklyn. Her scenes glow with a harmless look of menace. Bad weather bleeds down from the sky in beautiful colors. A bit of quick thinking cures a bad case of the 24-hour Cartesian doubt. The silence of bush babies hanging around with their enormous eyes make it hard to sleep. That T. Rex throwing a fit just needs somebody to hold one of its tiny hands. And nobody up in here can say whether or not true love is just a binge of chemicals in the blood. Even so, little Victorian-looking children hang around, and one of them floats on a cloud of books, as far from Google as you can get. You go to Lauren’s website and her home page shows a wall with pictures of friends and words scrawled above the light switch: You are free. Be good. Be good. If I could afford a pair of wings, I’d fly off to Lauren’s world for a few days every January. A drive to Buffalo for a couple hours will have to do.