Portrait Society Gallery PSG) is pleased to present a solo exhibition by contemporary photographer Lauren Semivan, opening September 19 and running through November 1, 2025.

 

The title for the exhibition, “spoken by a ghost,”refers to the artist’s experience during COVID. As a new mother under quarantine, she recalls drifting through her home, peering out windows, and feeling like a ghost. Her photography has always had sentient presence, with veils of light, transparent fabric, spectral figures, and indecipherable spaces or locations. But during COVID, the blurring of boundaries between the real and the invented, between the three-dimensional and its translation into two-dimensional shadows and residue, felt more pronounced. 

 

In this body of work, dating from 2023 to 2025, Semivan has increasingly turned to color photography while also continuing to make black and white silver gelatin dark room prints, and life-sized, cyanotype contact prints with her partner, John Shimon. 

 

Primarily using an early 20th century, 8 x 10 inch view camera, Semivan’s images seem to exist at the limits of vision and comprehension. She seeks a convergence of the physical world with interior worlds, as a way to access both the eternal and the everyday.  She comments, “In seeking the invisible, which is at once unseen and everywhere; I consider photography as both a tool for escape and a means of self-knowledge, a door into the dark.”

​

Lauren Semivan’s compositions are constructed directly on the studio wall with objects, passages of drawing, draped fabric, wires and string. The tableaux are then photographed, resulting in an often dramatic reframing of the constructed arrangements into two dimensional images that feel porous, dreamlike, and otherworldly.

Semivan has been compared to the photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) who often photographed herself against various backdrops. Her work also relates to the experimental emphasis of the New Bauhaus constructivist photographers such as Nathan Lerner and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. 

​

Bio

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. Her work has been exhibited at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Paris Photo, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Wisconsin Art, and the Hunterdon Art Museum among others.  

Semivan’s work was recently published in With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932 (Cranbrook Art Museum, 2021), Essay’d III: 30 Detroit Artists (Wayne State University Press, 2019), Harper’s magazine, and Series of Dreams (Skeleton Key Press, 2018).  Reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, The Village Voice, and Photograph magazine.  Semivan’s work is part of permanent collections at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University, Cassilhaus, and The Elton John Photography Collection.  She is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York, David Klein Gallery in Detroit, Michigan, and The Portrait Society Gallery for Contemporary Art in Milwaukee, WI.  Lauren lives and works in Northeast Wisconsin.