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  Installations

Dion Laurent’s multi-media sculptural objects, installations and performance works are impossibly self-contained microenvironments that are hinged together by his skillful use of invention and ingenuity and his keen sense of balance and placement.

“With an inventive reworking of utilities such as the Air Phone and the Air Pump, enthusiastically constructed from found objects and household materials that look like they’ve already had a lot of everyday use, he develops and explores the campaign’s appeal to a sweat-of the-brow, do-it-yourself ethic. We intuit a certain Thoreau-like pride in his shelter and supplies; that sense of pioneering-spirit, self-sufficiency, a capacity to home-make for one.”(Ruth Catlow, London, 2003)

The artist works with the surplus of our materially dependent commerce society reconstituting ephemera into inventive systems. These precarious and multi-faceted systems are based on sensory modalities in which the artist incorporates specific objects-aromatherapy, stereos, foodstuffs, computers and video-to invoke all of the senses underscoring the ‘nature’ of our lived experience. These compressed, quasi living and breathing systems function on multiple levels both inert and active and seek to cause a dynamic experience for the viewer and in turn a structure of reference."

Laurent’s work is pleasantly unrefined. His wry sculptures of found objects look like they were created by a mad scientist on a low budget. The combination of lights, video, moving parts, smoke machines and more assembled as poetry creates a sculptural experience one can’t ignore.

Airport, Bayennale, Oakland/San Francisco, 2005

EarthMan and Airport

Airport and EarthMan Photos

Market Street Emporium, Nashville, "Bamboo" 2003

Tree House, Part III, Poissant Gallery, Houston, 2003

O2 Service Station, Poissant Gallery, Houston 2003

18 Images, Description and Review

CREA  Alsace, France   "Zone Fumeur"  2002

Visual Arts Gallery, Texas A&M University  "All Over our Planet"  2000

Winter Street Art Center, Houston  "Zen"  1997

Itoki Crystal Hall, Osaka "Yakushima to the World" 1996

Live Drawing Performance with Seitaro Kuroda

CREA  Alsace, France "La Terre est en Danger" 1994

Guardian Garden Gallery, Tokyo "Up Side Down" 1993

"Chapelle 5.20.100" Auvers sur Oise, France, 1990 with Louis Perrin and Olin Calk

An installation in a 13th century chapel and performance for the Centennial of Van Gogh's death in the village where he last  painted, died and is buried.  Documented by Olin, Louis, and Frank Peters (Germany)   Photo: Frank Peters