Octopus Initiative Artist Laura Shill
Laura Shill’s work is a collision of sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. She explores ideas of viewer and subject, disclosure and concealment, absence and intimacy. Her works explore the transformative potential of people and objects through early and experimental forms of image making that pair the sinister and beautiful. With this series, Absent Lovers, Shill photographs Harlequin romance novel covers and then removes all details except for one figure, who often remains trapped in a void of white and in an expression of passion or anguish. She considers these works to be collages made through subtraction rather than addition. Her act of erasure creates an image of unfulfilled desire and fantasy, which perhaps cuts to the true nature of the romance novel. Shill then makes large negatives of these collages from which she prints cyanotypes, hand-made photographs distilled down to a melancholy blue color. These works give pronounced presence to absence and ask us to consider the relationship between fantasy, desire, and loneliness.
Shill was born in 1980 in Birmingham, Alabama, and is currently based in Denver. She earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2012. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at the 2017 Venice Biennale at the European Cultural Center, The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, and Durden and Ray, Los Angeles. Her 2016 solo exhibition, Phantom Touch, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.
