Home Sweet Home is Natan Lawson’s first solo exhibition in the Baltimore area and includes a new series of paintings and sculpture.  The works in Home Sweet Home reference imagery found in home interiors - a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic look back at the tactility of childhood. Crafting projects, fridge drawings, bedroom decorations, wallpaper, pets, toys and games, picture books, textiles, still life paintings, floral patterns, and seasonal decorations inform the imagery that has been scanned or sourced from the internet and collaged, combined, and adjusted. This specific and loaded imagery is simultaneously autobiographical and universal, familiar to an 80s and 90s upbringing. Lawson revisits and monumentalizes these bygone aesthetics as meditation on collective and personal loss. This series builds on Lawson’s previous, abstract iconography sourced from a vast archive of printed material, referencing vintage computer graphics, graphic design, logos, and instruction manuals. In this new body of work, Lawson continues his use of modified CNC and vinyl cutter machines to explore and subvert grid-oriented imagery. These mechanical units have been hacked and altered to use the axis-bound arm to execute imagery with a range of traditional artist media including acrylic paint and Copic ink applied with brushes and airbrush. Lawson’s machines effectively “print” manipulated digital images that are sent from a computer, requiring separation of the files into color layers much like other printmaking processes. The process has parallels to and visual echoes of traditional methods of creating images on a grid including textile production techniques like cross stitch and weaving. This alternative approach to painting involves stops and starts, swapping colors, misregistration, error, and imperfection, all of which become part of each final piece and reflect a process that is not fully streamlined and predictable.

Home Sweet Home is Natan Lawson’s first solo exhibition in the Baltimore area and includes a new series of paintings and sculpture.  The works in Home Sweet Home reference imagery found in home interiors - a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic look back at the tactility of childhood. Crafting projects, fridge drawings, bedroom decorations, wallpaper, pets, toys and games, picture books, textiles, still life paintings, floral patterns, and seasonal decorations inform the imagery that has been scanned or sourced from the internet and collaged, combined, and adjusted. This specific and loaded imagery is simultaneously autobiographical and universal, familiar to an 80s and 90s upbringing. Lawson revisits and monumentalizes these bygone aesthetics as meditation on collective and personal loss. This series builds on Lawson’s previous, abstract iconography sourced from a vast archive of printed material, referencing vintage computer graphics, graphic design, logos, and instruction manuals. In this new body of work, Lawson continues his use of modified CNC and vinyl cutter machines to explore and subvert grid-oriented imagery. These mechanical units have been hacked and altered to use the axis-bound arm to execute imagery with a range of traditional artist media including acrylic paint and Copic ink applied with brushes and airbrush. Lawson’s machines effectively “print” manipulated digital images that are sent from a computer, requiring separation of the files into color layers much like other printmaking processes. The process has parallels to and visual echoes of traditional methods of creating images on a grid including textile production techniques like cross stitch and weaving. This alternative approach to painting involves stops and starts, swapping colors, misregistration, error, and imperfection, all of which become part of each final piece and reflect a process that is not fully streamlined and predictable.

Home Sweet Home is Natan Lawson’s first solo exhibition in the Baltimore area and includes a new series of paintings and sculpture.  The works in Home Sweet Home reference imagery found in home interiors - a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic look back at the tactility of childhood. Crafting projects, fridge drawings, bedroom decorations, wallpaper, pets, toys and games, picture books, textiles, still life paintings, floral patterns, and seasonal decorations inform the imagery that has been scanned or sourced from the internet and collaged, combined, and adjusted. This specific and loaded imagery is simultaneously autobiographical and universal, familiar to an 80s and 90s upbringing. Lawson revisits and monumentalizes these bygone aesthetics as meditation on collective and personal loss. This series builds on Lawson’s previous, abstract iconography sourced from a vast archive of printed material, referencing vintage computer graphics, graphic design, logos, and instruction manuals. In this new body of work, Lawson continues his use of modified CNC and vinyl cutter machines to explore and subvert grid-oriented imagery. These mechanical units have been hacked and altered to use the axis-bound arm to execute imagery with a range of traditional artist media including acrylic paint and Copic ink applied with brushes and airbrush. Lawson’s machines effectively “print” manipulated digital images that are sent from a computer, requiring separation of the files into color layers much like other printmaking processes. The process has parallels to and visual echoes of traditional methods of creating images on a grid including textile production techniques like cross stitch and weaving. This alternative approach to painting involves stops and starts, swapping colors, misregistration, error, and imperfection, all of which become part of each final piece and reflect a process that is not fully streamlined and predictable. ​​