Deborah F. Lawrence

Oversized and eclectic, Dee-Dee Does Utopia presents a series of meticulously crafted collages, made by the Seattle artist Deborah Lawrence, that explore popular concepts of the sublime. For the project, Lawrence combined images and texts to illuminate the results of a survey she conducted in November of 2004. Prompted by her own dismay at recent political events, the artist sent a mass e-mail posing the question, “What does utopia look like to you?” This volume brings elements from the responses together with other historical and literary utopian models. The imagery links many ideas of idealized environments--from the natural to the fabricated--layered in surprising formations and integrated with text that evokes medieval illuminated manuscripts. In “Beachtopia,” for example, Lawrence creates an extremely crowded seaside scene with hordes of people frolicking with beach balls near Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and Hiroshige's “Wave.”