Audrey Hope: Disappointed Tourist
October 7, 2022 – January 20, 2023
“At the heart of my work is my family’s idiosyncratic relationship to nature and travel. I grew up in precarious housing situations. My family took long camping and wilderness backpacking trips that disguised periods of homelessness. We were odd pilgrims. People often conceive of the natural world as a site for healing and spiritual reconnection. In my work, I present these assumptions as fraught–bringing a sense of strangeness and an unsettling comfort to viewers.”
—Audrey Hope
For her first solo museum exhibition, Audrey Hope presents a selection of collages, photographs, and mixed media sculptures. Titled Disappointed Tourist, the series is a deeply personal meditation on nature, religion, personal trauma, and creativity. In Disappointed Tourist, Hope addresses several expansive themes—the complicated relationship between nature and travel, desperation in creativity, and the magical capacity objects have for representation.
Smaller than her previous works, the sculptures in Disappointed Tourist are discrete and portable, like reliquaries. Lost-wax cast bronze bases support and disrupt sculptures that incorporate shreds of material with narrative qualities: tufts of fur, photographs, charms. Each work of art in the exhibition is a shrine, a site for adoration and remembrance.
The exhibition opening for Disappointed Tourist will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 7 during the Lightner Museum’s fall Community Open House.
About the Artist
Audrey Hope is an artist who works between installation and sculpture. Born in Santa Cruz, California, Hope is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. Hope holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a 2017 Frontiers of Innovation Scholar. In 2014 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with Tufts University, and was awarded a 2014 Traveling Fellowship by the School. She has previously taught at the University of San Diego, Pepperdine University, and the University of California, San Diego.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at: after hours gallery, Los Angeles; Wooba Project Space, Austin; Actual Size Los Angeles; Best Practice, San Diego; DXIX Projects, Los Angeles; MaRS Gallery, Los Angeles; kijidome, Boston. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at: Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Dallas; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Centro de las Artes San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico; OSLO10, Basel, Switzerland; x-pon art, Hamburg, Germany; SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico.
Learn more at: audrey-hope.com
About Lightner Local
Created to showcase the extraordinary talents of artists who live in the Northeast and Central Florida regions, Lightner Local is supported by the Benjamin and Jean Troemel Arts Foundation.
