Lauren La Rose

Lauren La Rose is an American multidisciplinary artist, and educator. As a Merit Scholar, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she trained as a filmmaker and fiber artist. As an educator, she advocates for equitable access to the visual arts and has worked with veterans, youth and formerly incarcerated women and their families. In 2018, she won an Official Selection Award for the Together! London Disability Film Festival and the Women CIneMaker’s Independent Filmmaker Biennale. In 2019, she was Shortlisted for Bloomberg Contemporary.

Language, in its broadest sense, imbue the video, sound, installation work of American multi-media artist Lauren La Rose. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, her work encompasses social practice and video, often using humor as a means to confront the viewer with aspects of contemporary culture and history. Employing concepts of absence and failure, La Rose combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic, literary and popular culture references to create complex film that twist fiction and reality. By documenting her family, her work explores the boundaries of fiction and fantasy; intimacy and disconnection; grief and loss, which gravitates toward the idea of the body becoming an archive for larger social economic issues.

Gay Bond is a prequel to Papi and the Pretty Boys. Inspired by contemporary documentary filmmaking techniques, the story follows the making of a film that will never be made. Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, Gay Bond, combines Larry La Rose’s fictional narrative, in which he plays a gay secret agent (Agent 68), with documentary footage of his daily life as a disabled veteran. The film reveals a myriad of complex relationships between La Rose’s family, former partners and new lovers, but ultimately is about the love of a daughter for her father whom she has meticulously filmed since 2005.