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 through semiological (re)processing 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 simulated environments, I blend the real and the fabricated, creating photographs made out of shots of different times and places, thus composing my images layer upon layer in a process closer to painting than traditional photography.

HAIKU REVIEW: LAUREN MARSOLIER photographs (or more precisely, makes photographs of) what seem to be impossibly lucid places, clean, brilliantly lit, devoid of people but clearly manmade, full of atmosphere and yet as arid spiritually as they are physically. Of course we recognize quickly - albeit not quite instantly - that Marsolier has fabricated these places, deftly manipulating reality with digital intervention. But the incontestability of their falseness does not diminish the profundity of these pictures' effect, any more than it would were they paintings or drawings (which one or another seems occasionally to be). These are dreamscapes, pure and simple, as unlikely but as unshakeable as an apparition conjured just before waking, the photographic equivalent a century later of De Chirico's Metaphysical painting. - Peter Frank