Lauren Marsolier

Today we are excited to revisit one of our favorite photographers. 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 Artforum and 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 Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum. Today we share her series, Dislocation.

Dislocation 

I create images using multiple photographs, captured in a variety of locations. Each composition is shaped slowly, over time, layer by layer, through trial and error. This approach allows me to represent the world photographically without showing a specific place, focusing instead on a mental experience. The work probes our relationship to a globalizing world, marked by the loss of its certainties, the implosion of clear boundaries between the real and the simulated, and an overall sense of placelessness. 
In a composite photograph, liberated from the single point of view of indexical representation, a new visual vocabulary can emerge. A subtle combination of multiple perspectives, lighting sources, and distances is used to produce disorientation in the viewer, who perceives something is off but does not immediately pinpoint the origin of his uncertainty. The landscapes are ambivalent, familiar and yet not identifiable. The work constructs an experiential bridge between self and environment, blending the physical landscape with the landscape of the mind. It is a reflection of our world without being a direct representation of it. As Art critic George Melrod put it, the work exists in ‘a limbo-like, in-between state, between fiction and document, between virtual and physical reality.

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