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 Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 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, Cassilhaus, 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 - False Twilight

My ongoing body of work hinges upon 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. The early 20th century large-format view camera is an instrument for both precision and abstraction; recording the limits of our vision and comprehension, and channeling forces counter to the visible. Images are constructed in the studio through the contemplative study and manipulation of a hand-built, sculptural environment. 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.

False Twilight, another term for Zodiacal Light, refers to a faint, cone-shaped glow which can be seen just before sunrise above the eastern horizon. The source of this light is diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Within this body of work, False Twilight illustrates a sense of fugitive light created by glowing, atmospheric chalk outlines emanating from objects in my photographs. This title also speaks to an attempt to fool the viewer using the camera, to create an illusion or suspension of disbelief using visual means. Influences on this work include the early still life paintings of contemporary Latvian- American artist Vija Celmins, and Magical Realist painters such as Dorothea Tanning and Gertrude Abercrombie, who created a personal lexicon of objects as descriptive of dreams and psychic phenomena, and having inherent metaphoric or symbolic meaning. The images in this exhibition result from disparate yet connected sources; meditating on the rural Wisconsin landscape from the passenger seat of a car, working in the studio alongside a curious four-year-old, the changing color of northern light reflected from Lake Michigan, sifting through forgotten objects, and tuning into the static that emerges.