Lucy Puls’ project at FOYER-LA, To_Fall_Freely, alludes to the slippage of a poetic façade. Puls starts with a fascination of the discarded- cast-offs from dumpsites, thrift stores, curbsides, and uninhabited houses. Her photographs survey the vacated as containers of memory capturing a ghost like residue of its prior inhabitants’ usage: “Stained and gouged floors and walls reside with glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. A bedroom door with a fist-sized hole is covered with colorful stickers. Felted tangled clumps of hair, insect husks and fibers rest along the edges of a room with a doorjamb marked with notations of children’s height. All contribute to a narrative affirming that daily life was quite ordinary, yet complicated, in these now wild-seeing spaces.”

Puls then subjects her photographic prints to elaborate concoctions creating a newly corroded complex surface that is printed on fabric like paper permitting her to re-form the image into a 2/3d semblance. The work hangs on the wall with weight. Puls declares, “In our culture we both are drawn to things that confer status and made anxious by the pursuit of them. I look for ways to reference the psychological bewilderment and overwhelming-ness of this state of being.” Puls transforms a discarded, potentially melancholic place into an optically textured materialized mystery.

Artist: Lucy Puls