Carmela Laganse
Carmela Laganse’s practice is engaged with the intersections of embodied experience and perception as well as exploring the agency and ideologies embedded in objects. Her work explores the effects of colonialism and examines how it contributes to material culture and identity. Working in a variety of media, she often builds interactive work or portable, modular environments that playfully and critically integrate physical, emotional, ritualistic, and intellectual processes through an intersectional lens.
Laganse received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005. Recent exhibitions include Hamilton Now, Object at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Spread at the Art Gallery of Guelph, ON.
Carmela Laganse’s Memes is an installation of small characters/figurines influenced by
forms of mass communication that have been simplified and reduced to convey ideas,
for example, religious icons, comic books, and internet memes. Why do we find comfort
in images that are repeated in a slightly reformatted and familiar pattern? Is the viral
popularity of the internet meme simply a result of generations of exposure to this
strategy of branding? Is this how we absorb and disseminate information now?
These symbols, whether 2D, 3D, or text, attach themselves to our psyche like a baby
‘Alien’ or a Vulcan Mind Meld, subliminally, embedding themselves in our
subconscious/social consciousness. Carmela’s work comments on and is derivative of
social gaming symbols and iconography that have gone viral online, perhaps a form of
insinuation.