About — Lauren Semivan

Biography

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 at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Paris Photo, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Museum of Wisconsin Art, and the Hunterdon Art Museum among others.

Semivan’s work was recently published in With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932 (Cranbrook Art Museum, 2021), Essay’d III: 30 Detroit Artists (Wayne State University Press, 2019), Harper’s magazine, and Series of Dreams (Skeleton Key Press, 2018). Reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, The Village Voice, and Photograph magazine. 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 Photography Collection. She is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York, David Klein Gallery in Detroit, Michigan, and The Portrait Society Gallery for Contemporary Art in Milwaukee, WI. Lauren lives and works in Northeast Wisconsin.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Within my ongoing body of work, the early 20th century large-format view camera is an instrument for both precision and abstraction; creating a document of the limits of our vision and comprehension, of forces counter to the visible. The resulting images represent a convergence of two scales; the physical world, and the interior world lying hidden in all things, a synchronism of the eternal and the everyday.

Images are constructed in the studio through 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. Seeking the invisible, which is at once unseen and everywhere; I consider photography as both a tool for escape and a means of self-knowledge, a door into the dark.

Compositions evolve, are photographed, and then devolve into the next image. Materials and objects photographed are discarded or reincorporated into future works, secondary to the photograph itself. Black and white negatives are contact-printed in cyanotype, silver gelatin, or enlarged in the darkroom to create large-scale silver prints. Large-format color negatives are scanned and converted to digital with minimal editing of the image.