SUMMER RESIDENCY SHOWCASE 2024

Lauren McDowell is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, installation, writing, theatre arts, drawing, and more. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Narrative Studies from the University of Southern California, with minors in Art and Classics.

Her work often explores elements of the natural world and visual representations of anthropocentrism as a matter of spectacle. In this residency, she set out to bridge interests in documentary photography (which asks you to assume objectivity) and of the theater (which asks you to imagine a reality in a physical space) through an installation project and a variety of media. She pursued modes of documentation to create a fictional space capturing time and narrative within physical objects. How do you create and recognize a site of significance, and what are the “scripts” one follows in different kinds of sites and in front of different kinds of objects? Are they participatory, reverential, destructive, delighted?