Lauren Marsolier

www.LaurenMarsolier.com

My work deals with the psychological experience of transition, a particular phase when our parameters of perception change; we suddenly don’t perceive 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 multiply experiences that propel us into that mental place where the reality we knew is not the one we sense any longer. We repeatedly get that 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 the image and its referent, appearance and reality. We have been introduced to a new stage of abstraction, a dematerialization of the world in which images and signs take on a life of their own and cause a shift in the human 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. Echoing our partly simulated environments, I blend the real and the fabricated, creating images whose verisimilitude prompts the viewer to question the nature of both their medium and their content.

— Lauren Marsolier, Los Angeles, California, USA