Lawrence Argent – Faculty Triennial 2012

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Above: pieces by Lawrence Argent

It’s impossible to stroll around downtown Denver without bumping into the work of DU sculpture professor Lawrence Argent. After all, Argent is the artist behind Denver’s famous blue bear – properly titled I See What You Mean. On the DU campus, Argent’s Whispers celebrates the open pursuit of learning through lecture, debate, and dialogue. Based on 3D digital scans of the faces of several students in Argent’s classes, its over-sized limestone and bronze lips appear closed and mute. As one approaches the sculpture, however, voices of actual lectures and public events on campus emerge softly from concealed audio speakers nearby.

Argent writes:

In my research, I am interested in an arena of visual discourse that resides elementally in the perception and recognition of form. Whilst this statement is overwhelmingly obtuse, there lies an avenue of exploration that I find extremely fascinating. Quite simply, it unfolds into how one interacts with the visual world and the process by which we as participants exchange and relate with this data. My work emerges as a consequence of this insight, focusing my interests in the relationship of assumptions, passages of thought and preconceived sensory filters. Somewhere in the gap between stimulus and response, I attempt an investigation into the known entities of form, material and the language derived from the relative subjective and objective associations. My interest is in the articulation of meanings that become attached or assigned to what one observes.

To see more of Argent’s work, please visit www.lawrenceargent.com
Read more about Argent in the DU Today article A Tale of an Artist and a Big Blue Bear