PENUMBRA Members Gallery | Lauren Orchowski
Blasting Area
Blasting Area refers to the warning text on the signposts designating the boundary between the largest excavation - quarry site on the shores of the Hudson River and the neighborhood where my family owned a home for half a century in upstate New York.
To translate the physiological impression I carry with me from having grown up with the repeated sounds and sensations of the timed blasts that rumbled the community and school, I forwent making a direct documentary record of the houses in the neighborhood with a camera and instead constructed three dimensional sculptures replicating my, neighbors’, and friends’ homes using graphite drawings made on fiber based silver gelatin photo chemical paintings. I could never see the rock exploding or the plumes of dolomite dust clearing each time the earth below me shook as a child, yet my imagination ran wild and I romantically envisioned that the process must resemble a shifting landscape akin to the formation of a new world somewhere in the universe.
As I was growing up my cognitive awareness of time registered as I learned how many thousands of years were needed for the Hudson River Valley to be carved by glacial activity in contrast to the way the quarry’s exponentially deepening, unnatural shape took form. I would often ride my bike through the the mounds of rock that resembled a moonscape avoiding the edges of new nothingness within the quarry after it closed to see where a piece of landscape I was once familiar with was now missing. This unsettling childhood memory is interwoven with the recognition as to how much we rely on mining and resource extraction globally, the dependance we have on the process to sustain and build our modem world with seemingly disposable architecture, and the power we attempt to exert over the landscape vs. the flux of responses nature warns us with in return.
To parallel this set modern realities and visual memories, I photograph each of the three dimensional sculptures I’ve built of the homes with a 7” x 17” large format view camera and film. I then contact print the negatives into spaces where the homes rest between a state of momento mori and topographical infinities.
Artist Bio
Working in an analog darkroom since the age of 15, Lauren Orchowski’s process and practice is deeply rooted in the utility of chemistry, large format film photography, and sculpture using the physical properties of light to suggest darkness. Her work examines the critical issues encompassing science, consumption, the spaces we identify as home, and the survival of our species on Earth by introducing the archaeological framework of light to be experienced simultaneously as an object and its absence as primal artifact.
Most recently Orchowski’s work was included in the inaugural RUST BELT BIENNIAL, received an Honorable Mention from the 2019 HARIBAN AWARD, was selected for the FOTOFILMIC SPRING 2021 JOURNAL, and shortlisted for the MESH PRIZE. Other venues her work has appeared in include the International Space Station, New York Photo Festival (New York City, NY); Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography (Detroit, MI); Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art (St. Joseph, MS); Rhode Island Center For Photographic Arts (Providence, RI); SITE Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); Minnesota Center for Book Arts (Minneapolis, MN); Rockland Center for the Arts, (West Nyack, NY); The Zimmerli Museum (New Brunswick, NJ); chashama gallery + project space (New York, NY); and the Hunter College Times Square Gallery (New York, NY).
She was named a 2019 New York City Resident Penumbra Workspace finalist and has also held residencies at the The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SIM) in Reykjavik and Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan.
Her work is represented in several collections including The Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, The Rutgers Archives for Printmaking, The George Eastman Museum, The International Center for Photography Library, and the collection of Roy DeCarava.
Orchowski’s work has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times, LENSCRATCH, photoworks UK, Scientific American, VICE - Culture, Humble Arts Foundation, Gizmodo- France, United States, and Australia, and Art.Critical.
She holds a BFA in photography from Arizona State University and earned her MFA in photography from Hunter College, City University of New York where she was also awarded an exchange fellowship to study Visual Communication at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, Germany. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, she lives and works in New York City.
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