Natalya Kornblum-Laudi (b. 1996, she/her) is a Brooklyn-based artist who grew up in the Hudson Valley. Her practice works to unravel the cultural and historic repackaging of the rural lifestyle depicted in media culture, harkening back to landscape paintings that performed as propaganda for westward expansion all the way to contemporary real estate advertisements that sell a pastoral view of “country life”. Her work is concerned with the visual commodification of rural culture, she is interested in how a once useful tool in the hand of a laborer, can be repurposed for decoration and perform its new function as an indicator of class. She often recreates and queers objects and/or tools from the 19th century in new materials to explain this nostalgic narrative calcified in the American imagination and to unravel the real cognitive dissonance and/or code switching that is psychologically necessary for certain identities existing within rural culture. Laudi uses traditional craft to explore how our understanding of one’s competency is often gendered, and how this bias is transposed onto materials and who crafts/manipulates them, the association often changing based on context.
She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 where she was awarded the TC Colley Scholarship for Excellence in Photography. She has since shown her work in Providence, RI, Upstate New York and New York City. Most recently her quilt, Where I Lay (2023), was featured in the New York Times. She is currently pursuing an MFA in sculpture at Columbia University in New York City.