Office Hours

Part of Locally Made's One Room.
During Office Hours, artists, designers, experts, and brainiacs take the doors off of their offices and studios. Stop by for conversation or advice.
Jon Laustsen will create an immersive office/studio environment including projected images, looping text, related scaled-down building materials and individual pieces-in-process reflecting the inner workings and background questions behind a current project in process. This will be a rare opportunity to discover and talk with the artist about themes related in past and present work about building, dwelling, shelter, model-making and lifetime pursuits, and how these are interwoven and drive a work's particular anatomy. — Jon Laustsen
Free with museum admission.
Jon Laustsen was born and raised in the Schenectady region of New York where (besides neighborhood bikesurveying and stick-and-leaf fort-building) the epic, literally underground public art collection within the Empire State Plaza in Albany made a huge impression at an early age in the late 70's and early 80's. In 1996 he received his BA studying philosophy and art at Bethel University in Minnesota and, since completing his MFA at RISD in 2002, has been exhibiting extensively in the Providence area, including in "VoiceOver" at the David Winton Bell Gallery, solo and group shows at AS220, Craftland and with Yellow Peril Editions. Laustsen's dream-like labyrinths and building fragments left in various forms of incompletion or decay flirt with found abstract and minimalist forms, while subverting traditional model-making to quietly reveal questions of dislocation, class and personal empowerment. He is the recipient of two fellowships in 3-D Art from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the critic's award for best work in a group show at the 2010 New England Art Awards. Laustsen's sculptures and installations have been exhibited throughout New England and in Miami, New York, and Minneapolis and are featured in a number of private collections.