Dollhouses and VHS tapes and quilts and receipts bearing David Lynch’s face – these are some of the raw materials Lauren Be Dear assembles for her deeply personal, multisensory installations. The results’ dark topics – trauma, mental health – are leavened by the artist’s liberal use of color. She embraces her inner light to turn pain into beauty. 

Be Dear’s lifelong love of art took on this meaning in 2011, after a manic episode led to her bipolar diagnosis. “Art was no longer simply a creative outlet.” Be Dear said. “That diagnosis started me on the journey of ‘I need to figure out how to heal in a way that isn’t so clinical.’ I mean, I need my medication and I need my doctors and I need all those good things, but there’s alternative ways to heal. Art was that for me.”

Her work since has been an open book – or, custom prescription bottle, a spoken word album, and interactive collages, all manifestations of Lauren’s pain. Her recent installation, Party/Monster, directly incorporates her most recent manic episode.

“It tore my family apart.” Be Dear told me. “I think it hit my mom and my brother the hardest.” 

To move forward, Be Dear asked her mother to record a monologue describing the episode from her POV.

“My heart is broken. I’m so hurt and sad and miss you dearly,” her mother says steadily as a montage of Be Dear singing, playing the ukulele, clearing out a shed, and addressing the camera plays in a box bleeding shredded ribbon. The viewer listens and watches, there and removed, trapped as a witness. Above it all, an iridescent, pinwheel-like quilt made of mementos from her past.

Be Dear’s ongoing series, infinitlovalie, is more joyful. It reframes her past by transforming dollhouses into replicas and echoes of her and her family’s lives. From those dollhouses’ windows, she projects family videos taken from the 1940s-1970s and from 1992-2001. Alongside them run undulating poems – love letters to a past she now accepts. 

Be Dear writes on her website that infinitlovalie helped her embrace what one finds when they release pain: “An infinite universe waiting to love and support you.”

Interior closeups from one of Be Dear’s dollhouses.