Feature image: Nebulae, 2025, #1/5, archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
By Samantha Timm
Lauren Semivan’s photographs are built worlds that trace her studio movements and propose probing questions about time and space.
Using an early 20th-century large-format camera, Semivan captures scenes that she creates in her studio through a curious process of composition and performance. Her images tend towards the mysterious and prompt an invitation to viewers: to wonder.
After encountering her recent work at the Portrait Society Gallery for Contemporary Art in Milwaukee, I found myself wondering about movement in Semivan’s photographs, and how much of this larger gesture was driven by the artist’s own movements to compose, place, draw, pull, paint, and finally, to photograph.
In a past interview for METAL Magazine, she compared the process of composing these scenes to “choreographing an event that takes place in front of the lens, almost like a ballet…” Her current creative process remains tied to this medium: she compares the development of the final image to the kind of intensity and studied “rehearsal” required for a performance and describes her artwork as “the culmination of all that energy in the brief exposure of film within the camera.”
For Semivan, “the exposure of a large format negative is much like a symphony orchestra performance, ballet, theater production…”
Physically, she notes a lot of “stepping forward toward the set, then stepping backward to lift the dark cloth and look into the camera.” Over a matter of hours and days, she finds herself “going up and down a step ladder, stretching my arms up to reach the top of the wall with a large drawing or piece of fabric, reaching across the wall, hammering pins, making a mark with charcoal, dropping something, stepping down, stepping back to look into the camera, repeating that sequence.”
This fluency in performance stems from her study of music from a young age, something she continued alongside her art education in college.
Semivan’s compositions read like tableaux, and there is a stillness in them that conjures not only a sense of immediacy but also of tension, as if she is pulling on the threads of time and composing with them.
Threads and found objects are suspended in the air and seem to provide a glimpse into a layered studio moment packed with meaning–caught and grounded firmly by her charcoal marks but allowed to hang precariously from string as their stories seem to emanate out in smudges of soft, dramatic color.
In Parasol, for instance, the painted olive greens and dark grey-blues almost appear as if they were drawn onto the wall by this found object–as if this hazy impression is a rubbing-off of the parasol’s physical and material history.
While the history of this particular item is unknown, Semivan was initially interested in “how the color of the fabric that was visible had been bleached from the sun, but the fabric that was tucked into the folds when closed had remained unchanged.” She muses, “Something in it seemed to speak about time and layers…so I decided to investigate it.”
In between these layers of studio time, Semivan reveals the thinness between past and present, and leaves space for us to navigate around the incisive lines that are mapped onto her broader gestures of color. These movements–at times sweeping, and others, a slow lilt–guide us into the nebulous space of history and time where we might find our own moment of stillness in it all.
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.
To learn more about Lauren Semivan, visit laurensemivan.com and connect on Instagram at @lsemivan.