French-born photographer Lauren Marsolier lives and works in Los Angeles. She has received many awards and her images have been published internationally.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Images courtesy of Lauren Marsolier
Discover: www.laurenmarsolier.com