Laura Stoland
Stoland’s work suggests a location where our fondest sympathies and private aversions are brought into public scrutiny--a world in which sickness and health are equally likely… the viewer and the artist are cast in discomforting roles… rhetoric reveals anxieties that view death and sickness as curable aberrations. Stoland suggests that the clinical attempt to re-construct a pre-injury state is a reassurance for the well, insurance against the casino of fate, but not a necessary goal for the injured. Her own work is a search for empathy, as tough on the viewer as it is on herself as an artist.
- Maika Pollack, Southfirst Gallery
Sophisticated humanity, really humility, comes to Laura from her life story which informs her work and her ideas about "normality" "health" and "beauty". These notions have been put to good use, wrought into a conceptually fine body of work that comes to participate in many of the larger artistic and cultural dialogues of our time.
- Frances Whitehead, Artist