The Hard and the Faithful : Copies

This project examines replication as both method and myth. Copying operates as a sculptural strategy and conceptual device, forming a feedback loop through which spectacles and their degenerating myths sustain themselves. Láura studies recurring motifs within South African sites of staged atmosphere: a childhood garden shed, casinos, carnivals, malls, roadside attractions, and even the art academy. These spaces function as contained worlds and approximations of utopia, built through carefully coded material and spatial illusions. Láura's practice interrogates formulas of world-building through the blueprints of these “playscapes.” Her sculptural practice adopts the strategies that make these spectacles persuasive: copy shamelessly, overwhelm with multimedia and light to fill the void, sustain the tease between sacred and profane, anchor the illusion in a well-known lineage to produce audience reassurance through the iconic, and enclose the room to control its terms. She finds the props that best parody these degenerating myths in cement ornament stores. She then forges aluminium over the garden ornaments, producing an “original” copy from the serial and decorative. By defacing these cement translations of well-known emblems, she questions origins and critiques the naturalisation of Western myths on South African terrain through the language of ornament. The exhibition therefore produces a “cast room” of garden replicas that parodies the Western academy’s plaster halls of Renaissance greats, as well as a parallel room of 'Copia', meaning excess and abundance. In this second room, the patina of seduction and spectacle is expressed through the subsequent hollow copies, or artworks. As a sculptor, she both deploys and exposes this lucrative machinery of spectacle as a process of hollowing and naturalising once-troubling myths through standardisation. Láura positions herself simultaneously as both knower and dupe of the spectacle. The work concludes not with critique alone but with recognition. Fantasy is not merely aesthetic; it is a technology, a symbolic machine.