Lauren Semivan: Spoken by a Ghost
LAUREN SEMIVAN: Spoken by a Ghost
March 20- May 11 2024
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present “Spoken by a Ghost” a solo exhibition of new work by Lauren Semivan.
Semivan’s image making process takes place 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. She seeks that invisible thing which is at once unseen and everywhere; an investigation and interrogation of potential signals, she considers 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 arescanned and converted to digital with minimal editing of the image.
Within Semivan’s ongoing body of work, the early 20th century large-format view camera has been her means, an instrument for both precision and abstraction; creating a document of the limits of our vision and comprehension, of sight’s periphery and of forces counter to the visible. The resulting work represents a convergence of two scales; the physical world, and the interiorworld lying hidden in all things, a synchronism of the eternaland the everyday.
Lauren Semivan 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, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Hunterdon Art Museum among others. Semivan’s work is part of permanent collections at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Wriston Galleries at Lawrence University, and the Elton John Photography Collection. She lives and works in Appleton, Wisconsin.
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Lauren Semivan (b. 1981) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She received a BA in studio art from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2004, and an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006.
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 Hunterdon Art Museum, and Museum of Wisconsin Art among others.
Lauren's work was recently published in With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932, 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, and is included in permanent collections at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University, and The Sir Elton John Photography Collection.
LAUREN SEMIVAN
Mar 20 - May 11, 2024