La photographe Lauren Marsolier compose des images dépourvues de vie aux accents surréalistes. Elle recrée un monde imaginaire où l’homme n’a plus sa place. On y croise plastique, bitume et parpaings, murs aveugles, graviers joliment ratissés et pelouses immaculées. Ainsi ses séries de photographies Transition et Dislocation nous racontent la solitude et la déshumanisation péri-urbaine.

Constituées à partir de prises de vue issues du monde réel, ces images sont entièrement, et minutieusement, recomposées dans un logiciel de traitement d’image. En résulte des compositions très travaillées et extrêmement construites. Ne reste que des no man’s land désertiques et invivables, mais néanmoins non dénués d’humour et de poésie. Une retraite entre zone industrielles désertées, stations balnéaires hors saison et studio de cinéma.

Des espaces hors du temps qui ne sont pas sans nous rappeler ceux de Di Chirico, Max Ernst ou René Magritte.

– Consulter le Portfolio de Lauren Marsolier

La présentation de l’artiste sur son site :

In a world where photographs are taken and shared in an instant, Marsolier’s images go through many stages and possibilities before finding their definitive form. Created from multiple photographs captured in a variety of locations, each composition is shaped slowly, over time, layer by layer, through trial and error. This approach allows her to represent the world photographically without showing a specific place, focusing instead on a mental experience. Hers is a kind of perceptual photography, exploring what is sensed rather than the immediately visible. In a composite photograph, liberated from the single point of view of indexical representation, a new visual vocabulary can emerge. A subtle combination of multiple perspectives, lighting sources, and distances is used to produce disorientation in the viewer. The landscapes are ambivalent, familiar and yet not identifiable. The work probes our relationship to a globalizing world, marked by the loss of its certainties and an overall sense of placelessness. It constructs an experiential bridge between self and environment, blending the physical landscape with the landscape of the mind. As art critic George Melrod put it, the work exists ’in a limbo-like, in-between state, between fiction and document, between virtual and physical reality.

Marsolier currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2015 she was included in a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London discussing contemporary landscape photography, along with fellow artists : Thomas Struth, Penelope Umbrico, Massimo Vitali and Mishka Henner. Her work is included in the collections of institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum. Marsolier is the recipient of the 2013 Houston Center for Photography fellowship award, which included a solo exhibition of her work at the institution. In 2013, she was also featured alongside Mitch Epstein, Robert Adams, Simon Norfolk, Edward Burtynsky, and others, in the London exhibition Landmark : The Fields of Photography, curated by William Ewing at the Somerset House. She was also part of the Humble Art Foundation 2012 selection of "31 Women in Art Photography" and was featured in the British Journal of Photography as one of 20 photographers to watch in 2013. Her work has been reviewed in such magazines as Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Art LTD, the Huffington Post, PDN, and Musee Magazine. Her 2015 monograph Transition published by Kerber Verlag received International Photography Awards 2015 First Prize in the Fine Art Book category.