Laura Rollins has a hard time making up her mind sometimes. “Try as I may,” says Rollins, “I am repeatedly drawn to the delicious juxtoposition of high and low art.” Though originally creating large scaled drawings and paintings pairing “cheesy” elements with serious subjects, the artist is now focused on sculptures and installations that playfully combine the humorous with the sublime.

Influenced by a variety of avant-garde artists, she combines notions of surface (Andy Warhol, Christo) with readymades (ManRay, Jeff Koons) and food substances utilized as artistic media (Josef Beuys, Sandy Skoglund, Janine Antoni).

Rollins’ use of actual Velveeta as an art-making medium along with figurative “cultural cheese” plays with and acknowledges society’s investment in a number of ideas—many of them related to preciousness and archivalness. Her Velveeta blueprint provides transformative surface cover for familiar objects and questions what (if anything) lies beneath literal and figurative layers.

The artist hails originally from the South, but now happily makes her home in Boston where she lives and works. She is a founding member of the Atlantic Works Gallery.