Mashanda Lazarus is a Los Angeles based textile sculpture artist.
Their work is representative of the gap between art and craft, masculine and feminine, mundane and fantastic. It is an ode to handiwork and technical skill, as well as an exercise in problem solving and repetition. It calls to attention the illusion of life, the gap between reality and imagination. To the artist, it is both drudgery and play.
It is intended to impress, fool, and confuse. It is trickery in the most chaotic good sense: the reveal should delight and both comfort and unsettle the viewer.
Their technical aim is to replicate (as closely as possible) functional or meaningful recognizable objects in an opposite material, rendering them useless. The chosen objects are treated as unique individuals with their own histories recorded in the various scrapes, dents, paint splatters, writing and other signs of wear. As each detail is discovered and replicated, the resulting works are portraits of those whose beauty is often ignored.
Each sculpture begins with some initial careful planning, photographing and measuring, but ultimately becomes a daring leap into the unknown as the machined parts of the original are replicated by the human hand. The solving of the structural problems that arise along the way is the true practice of this work.
Currently seeking gallery representation. Please email mashanda@gmail.com for a full CV.
Soft Sculpture for USC Dornsife Magazine “As Seen on TV?” 2015