Lauren Marsolier

My work deals with the mental process of transition, a particular phase when our parameters of perception shift; we suddenly don't see ourselves, our environment, or our life the way we used to. We undergo what could be called a gestalt change. That transitional phase feels like being in a place we know but can't quite identify. Living in a hyperreal world that mutates at an exponential speed, we repeatedly get a feeling of disorientation, dissonance and false reassurance as we try to adjust to a post-modern society marked by the implosion of the boundaries between image and referent, appearance and reality. 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 notion of the real. The loss of concrete connections to the objects of our senses creates a void within us, and unleashes a flow of new and elusive perceptions. Giving them the visual characteristics of a landscape is my way to explore them. Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality, my images are constructed from photographs taken in various locations over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and the fabricated become a seamless composition whose imperfect verisimilitude prompts the viewer to question the nature of both the medium and its content.