PHOTOGRAPHIC ABSTRACTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN KRASNOFF
Lauren received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and is based in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her work has been shown at the Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey State Museum, and Bokeh Show in Chelsea, NY. She has also curated exhibitions at Mason Gross Galleries and Rutgers University.
Lauren Krasnoff’s work references memory, art history, pop culture, and contemporary trends. She sees making art as her way of contending with the over-saturation of imagery and media we experience on a daily basis. Lauren uses paint to materialize "snapshots" of the mundane yet important people, places, and experiences in her life which she feels exceed the representational limits of the photo. Fascinated by her generation’s obsession with representing their lives through images, she wants to encapsulate her own life in paint as an earnest depiction of her experiences.
Her compositions begin as preliminary drawings which she eventually scales up. She creates invented perspectives and an economy of mark making in order to emphasize her intentional move away from photographic reference material. Lauren builds the spaces she imagines by pouring paint and moving it around with rags or large brushes. She treats oil paint as a drawing tool, wiping it away with q-tips or scratching lines into thicker areas with the back end of her brush. She takes a linear approach to form in which formal uses of line are woven into painting.
