Lauren Semivan’s work draws on a set of private gestures, an unveiling, performances for (and with) the camera using a vocabulary of elements from European avant-garde art in the 20th Century (Surrealism and the Futurists especially) but all seen through the filter of a particularly American sensibility, fusing more “progressive” high-art influences with those of folk tradition and the accidental brilliance of anonymous snapshots. There is something too of the vogue for spirit photography, of chance encounters, a colonial Gothic perhaps, with all the baggage that implies. One thinks of those artists displaced by the Second World War, adrift in New York and elsewhere, their sense of the irrational not ideally suited to the neon and chrome, how new everything was – and how much it promised, just then. But America is older than it seems – haunted even; Semivan’s photographs detail those unconscious histories and their implication. If the gestures seem obscure (perhaps wilfully so) or just inscrutably private, it is important to realise that they are essentially puzzles of reference and concealment, talking about what is not seen, a dialogue with presence. She casts herself as the shadowy manipulator of signs, the material and graphic components of the pictures like fragments of an unravelled language she is trying to re-assemble, but failing, as so much is lost and values re-assign themselves endlessly – it is the language of uncertainty. These famished rooms are the collision of self and history, of the old world with the new, just as these rooms are nowhere at all, though you might still recognise them. The rituals (if I can call them that), discoveries perhaps, are all interior – or as Beckett would have it, “we are needless to say in a skull,” that is, the confines of one experience, but then again, going in can often lead you to the way back out. Semivan is playing a serious game. You can find more of this fascinating work online here.
