Laura Shill, a Denver-based interdisciplinary artist, commits to creative community-building through the playful and profound lens of conceptual buffoonery, which she elevates to a high art form.
In Denver’s Tank Studios off South Broadway, a chair from Laura Shill’s 2022 solo exhibition Holy Fool doesn’t beckon me to sit in it. That’s because its two front legs have been replaced with plaster casts of shins and feet, and a pair of mounded buttocks occupy its seat.
“What are the butts about?” I ask, peeping at another rear end and feet tucked under a table.
“Shame, humiliation, [and] being fully exposed—like having your ass out in the wind,” explains Shill, as she shows me a RubeGoldberg-like device she made to slap herself in the face—a unicycle rimmed with silicone hands. Controlling its simulated touch, she chooses how much tenderness or uneasiness she wishes to experience.
In addition to a wealth of silicone casts of hands, feet, and derrieres surrounding us, stuffed fabric sculptures in various shades of meaty pink hang from the ceiling. The playful plush and plaster components of Shill’s installations make you feel like the only flesh and blood thing in a theatrical world of dense drapes and cartoony pastel colors. Similar to the dramatic raising of a circus tent or the curtain over jester marionettes, the immersive environments Shill constructs promise fun and uneasy spectacle.
Shill’s tongue-in-cheek installations aim to foster community and “cure loneliness” while engaging “ass-out-in-the-wind” vulnerability. Consciously taking on the role of the clown—even sometimes costuming herself in her line of “clowngerie”—Shill appears duty-bound to amuse and engage. Yet, the comic overtone of Shill’s oeuvre betrays a tragic underbelly as many of her pieces grapple with fears of failure, rejection, grief, and isolation.
Meeting her at the end of summer 2023, Shill’s studio brimmed with absurd and humorous objects made in preparation for the performance piece Working on Myself (2023), which involves choreographed circuit training in a “gym” of silicone hands that replace or are affixed to recognizable sports equipment.
“All [of the equipment] are failures that require desire and imagination to appear effective [because] they are not really choosing to give you touch and affection,” Shill tells me as she directs my attention to a failed sculpture—silicone hands dangling from retractable clotheslines that don’t yet retract to trace the silhouette of a participant’s body.
“Right now, I’m interested in material solutions for existential problems,” continues Shill, referring to the rampant alienation resulting from life under capitalism. “You can purchase your way into [working on yourself]. You can buy an app to breathe, which your body does on its own.”
Using farcical tools to alternately demoralize and encourage herself in front of others, Shill plays on a confluence of contradictory desires, including for social recognition and anonymity as, for example, one privately works out in the gym before going out into public. Additionally, highlighting a fraught desire for touch, Shill’s uncanny silicone hands liberate one from vulnerability through the simulation of touch while depriving one of the thrills of tactile human interaction.
Before leaving her home state of Alabama to pursue an MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder, she obtained a degree in journalism that grew into a fine art career through photojournalism and commercial photography. She keeps a darkroom in her studio behind a black, ruched curtain with a gold lamé centerpiece, framed by stuffed gold lamé chains.
Eyeing a photograph of a clown face down in a body of water while holding a cluster of helium-filled red balloons, Shill tells me the piece’s title: Still Available for Parties (2023). Currently on view through April 28, 2024, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts exhibition Performing Self, the ruffled light blue costume worn in the image hangs on a thick metal hanger next to the photograph; a set of silicone feet weigh down a pair of pantyhose that hang out the footholes of the garment.
As we spoke, Shill wore a button-up shirt in a similar shade of light blue, neatly tucked into dark gray jeans. When she revealed that she wore this uniform during her performance art, I realized she was staging another performance of herself for me. In the moment, I felt grateful but unworthy of this performance-for-one. If I had come on assignment as the art critic instead of a curious admirer, eager to learn more about her work, I’d use an analogy of a chef sending the food critic a special off-menu dish.
Embracing the art of buffoonery, Shill’s performance of self is often that of the clown. She first appeared as a clown during COVID-19 lockdowns for a friend quarantining and celebrating their birthday alone. While she wanted to offer her friend some relief through “absurdist joy,” Shill comments, “[This exchange was] also a reflection of the absurd horror we were living through.”
In one video, she sprayed a bundle of balloons with disinfectant, lightheartedly acknowledging the spread of a deadly disease we were still learning how to deter. Limited to virtual space for social interaction, Shill purposefully used film to express sincere and comedic care, nodding to spectacle as an increasingly prevalent way we construct and participate in reality.
In November 2022, she displayed her “clowngerie” in the solo show Holy Fool at Denver’s Understudy Gallery, which included delicate and diaphanous clown attire on gold hangers belonging to an icon that spanned the religious to the pornographic. As Shill notes, the genealogy of the clown is deeply historical and cross-cultural. It “speaks truth to power,” shows us the ludicrousness of social hierarchies in masquerade, and zooms in on what is otherwise too sad or frightening to confront in everyday life.
Exploring various longings surrounding the clown, Shill included blue-toned silicone hands that appear to be thawing after prolonged storage in a morbid chest freezer. “[This work was] an attempt to make subjects of objects by imposing existential suffering upon them, suspending them in states of perpetual longing,” Shill clarifies.
Before and in the wake of sequestered coronavirus lockdowns, Shill thought a lot about “states of perpetual longing” regarding connection, engagement, and how confinement impacts individuals and institutions. For these reasons, she developed creative ways for people to check in on one another through a series of exhibitions in 2019 and 2020. One included a robotic cat adoption project Companion Adoption (2019) for Black Cube Nomadic Museum’s The Fulfillment Center, a group show offering a fun and satirical spin on e-commerce warehouses. At Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Shill’s installation Including Other in the Self (2020) invited two visitors to sit across from each other, answering a questionnaire popularized in a 2015 New York Times article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”
Seeing “isolation as a precondition for totalitarianism,” Shill’s investment in community-building led her to found several ongoing clubs, including a book club, supper club, sauna club, French conversation club, and bocce ball club. During the 2020 presidential election, Shill started the Society of Ecstatic and Muffled Screams, meeting with others in various parks to scream into pillows. This past summer, Shill organized Yard Work, where members take turns hosting experimental sculpture exhibitions in their backyards.
Telling me a story about attempting to end on a high note during a recent artist talk, Shill picks up a self-massaging cane with an attached silicone hand. Shill re-enacts her moment on stage, telling her audience that when you’re craving connection, you can give yourself a back rub. She recalls that someone in the crowd immediately raised a hand, asking, “Aren’t you still alone using an object to touch yourself?”
“Yes, but validation comes from within,” Shill responded, giving herself a round of applause with a pair of hands affixed to kitchen tongs.
