Lauren Marsolier

French-born Lauren Marsolier lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of many awards and her images have been published internationally in such magazines as the British Journal of Photography where she was featured as one of ‘20 photographers to watch in 2013’. Her work was included in the ’31 Women in Art Photography’ 2012 selection by the Humble Art Foundation in NYC, ‘Looking at the Land’ at the RISD Museum of Art and also in the major 2013 London Exhibition ‘Landmark: The Fields of Photography’, curated by William Ewing at the Somerset House.  Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Houston Center for Photography, Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco) and Galerie Richard (NY and Paris). Her first monograph ‘Transition’ has recently been published by Kerber Verlag. Last November she was part of a panel discussion about contemporary landscape photography at TATE Modern in London, with fellow artists: Thomas Struth, Penelope Umbrico, Massimo Vitali and Mishka Henner.  Her work is part of many major collections including the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum.  Today we share her series, Transition- Part 3.

made from various photographs - 2010 Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality, Marsolier's images are shot in different places over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and fabricated become a singularly unique image. The resulting hyperreal photographs feel like viewing a place we know, but can't quite identify. It is this sense of disorientation in Marsolier's work that deliberately inclines the viewer to question the nature of both their medium and content, and references the shift in awareness one might experience during a period of transition.

Transition- Part 3

Lauren Marsolier creates spaces that are convincingly real using multiple photographs, unrelated fragments of the outside world collected over time in a variety of locations. Months or years often separate the capture of elements juxtaposed in her landscapes. Her photomontages are conceived using a personal photo library, following a process that is not unlike the way many painters make sketches at different locations and later combine them in a painting.

2011made from various photographs - 2011 Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality, Marsolier's images are shot in different places over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and fabricated become a singularly unique image. The resulting hyperreal photographs feel like viewing a place we know, but can't quite identify. It is this sense of disorientation in Marsolier's work that deliberately inclines the viewer to question the nature of both their medium and content, and references the shift in awareness one might experience during a period of transition.Lauren_Marsolier_6

Her work probes the mental process of transition, a particular phase when our parameters of perception shift, when we suddenly don’t see ourselves, our environment, or our life quite the same way we used to. These transitional periods often feel like being in a place we know but can’t quite identify. As we try to adjust to a post-modern society marked by speed and the implosion of boundaries between image and referent, appearance and reality, we repeatedly get this feeling of disorientation and dissonance. We have been introduced to a new stage of abstraction, a dematerialization in which images and signs take on a life of their own, divorced from our former notions of the real. The loss of concrete connections to the objects of our senses creates a void within us, but it also unleashes a flow of new and elusive perceptions. Giving them the visual characteristics of a landscape is her way to explore them.

Lauren_Marsolier_7 Lauren_Marsolier_8 Lauren_Marsolier_9 Lauren_Marsolier_10 Lauren_Marsolier_11 House and Tree Lauren_Marsolier-13   LWCC0

Located somewhere between fiction and reality, her images represent a mental landscape affected by a world of constant change. They show an unreality become manifest, transitional non-places where human action and inhabitation are recorded in strange antitheses of nature and artifice, or, better still, artificial nature and natural artifice.

To view more of Lauren’s work, please visit her website.