Detroit based artist Lauren Semivan presents once more a series of hauntingly beautiful black and white photographs that explore this prolific young artist’s dream-like narratives utilizing still life, drawing, painting and performance: “Pitch” is her most recent suite of work and goes on show this summer at Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE “Pitch”, Lauren Semivan, through 25 August 2017, Benrubi Gallery, New York www.benrubigallery.com/

Lauren Semivan is best known for her documentations of fleeeting, imagined moments in which she develops her subtle narrative. Her images consist of staged sets and scenes designed entirely by herself, where she photographs in the traditions of both still life and portraiture. Semivan commits each image to film, using an early 20th century 8×10 view camera.

Semivan’s photographs are the personal expression of a voice seemingly both wise and innocent. Calling to mind classic themes of memory and perception, the images are inviting, lush, and theatrical. Objects as diverse as books, furniture, boats, antique photographs, vegetation, and bones reoccur, as if clues to a larger story. While the artist’s backdrops are abstract and gestural– more contemporary than the objects they create a stage to—and display a more playful voice to the traditional themes. The images express both a knowledge and wonder; past and possibility.

The artist states about her “Pitch” series: “My relationship to photography is essentially a continuous questioning about the world and my own experiences. Artists, like physicists, are compelled to study forces running counter to the visible. As a child, Albert Einstein was inspired by a mystical experience with a compass needle. In Nadja, Andre Breton’s Surrealist romance, Breton describes a similarly intense emotional response to encounters with the unseen: “I am concerned with facts, which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal … which convince me of my error in occasionally presuming I stand at the helm alone.” These images are the result of a similar continuous investigation into the invisible: an identification and interrogation of potential signals.

My ongoing body of work has evolved through intense contemplative study and manipulation of a hand-built, sculptural environment. Within this constructed space, photographs transcend consensus reality, blurring boundaries between real and fictitious worlds. Compositions are painstakingly constructed and documented using the large-format camera, a tool for both precision and abstraction.

Propelled by a desire to explore ideas of perception, the images often contain something of the everyday to ground them, juxtaposed with something extraordinary or out of the world to set them free from the realm of the everyday. I use my own body within the work to anchor the images within a place of dreams and personal, human emotions.

I consider photography to be both a tool for escape, and an instrument for self-knowledge: a door into the dark.”

Lauren Semivan (b. 1981) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She received a BA in studio art from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at many galleries and museums such as the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Hunterdon Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, Paris Photo, and The AIPAD Photography Show. She has taught photography at College for Creative Studies, The Ohio State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Wayne State University.

Semivan has received numerous awards for her work including Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, and The Griffin Museum of Photography’s Griffin Award. In 2014, she was a finalist for The John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, and SF Camerawork’s Baum Award for Emerging Photographers. Her work was recently published in Black Forest: Four Visual Poems (Candela Books, 2014) and has appeared in The New Yorker, Artforum, and Photograph magazines. Semivan’s work is part of permanent collections at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University, and The Elton John Collection.
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