Work

ARTIST STATEMENT

I grew up in Middletown, Ohio where the poverty rate is well above the national average. The content I absorbed as a child primarily came from a local Catholic school, a household where I questioned the love between my parents, a black line at the bottom of a swimming pool, a weight room, and the semi-industrial landscape of a dying steel town from the backseat of a minivan. 

I didn’t pick up a camera until my sophomore year in college. By that point, I had stopped swimming competitively and was looking for an alternative outlet. When I got my hands on a camera in Professor Jeff Whetstone’s Intro to Analogue Black and White Photography class, I found what I was looking for. I became captivated by the way photography engages my body, heart, and intellect at once. I fell in love with the way the medium allows me to understand and visualize the nuanced relationships between my internal and external landscapes. 

The more I’ve centered myself in the process of making, the more I’ve been able to connect with the world around me. Art-making unconsciously increases my ability and desire to observe my environment as a source of inspiration, even the mundane and painful. I am currently working to combine materials and processes of different artistic disciplines in provocative and unexpected ways as a means of exploring the complex connections I observe in my environment–especially between nature, technology, money, gender, and power. My work engages many mediums including photography, music production, graphic design, sculpture, laser etching, installation art, and performance. I see my work as an evolving collage of mediums, methods, and mindsets. 

My influences span the likes of Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Michel Foucault, Lex Fridman, Albrecht Dürer, Hannah Höch, Andy Warhol, Thomas Ruff, Patti Smith, and JPEGMAFIA. Much like weight training supported my performance in the pool, I find that deriving inspiration from a variety of disciplines allows me the most freedom and growth in my art-making practice. My work is currently motivated by questions such as: What does my work say about the world in which I live? At what point does a work become explicitly political?

For more information on my most recent show:

https://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/lauren-olson‍ ‍

https://arts.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/practice-of-art-major-lauren-olson-24-discusses-her-senior-exhibition-i-hear-machines-underwater/