Laura Shill:

Phantom Touch

Laura Shill: Phantom Touch presented a selection of work by the Denver-based artist. The Tall Room, a new site-specific work, featured reclaimed materials in a richly mannered, densely layered environment and played with the gallery as a site of disclosure and concealment. The exhibition also included many cyanotypes from Shill's Absent Lovers series in which the artist appropriated images from covers of Harlequin romance novels. These haunting images often reveal a violent, sinister, and sexualized dynamic latent in the clichéd depictions of lovers from these stories.

Other examples of Shill’s photo-based practice similarly borrow images from wide-ranging sources including pornographic magazines but, through editing and fragmentation, focus on gestures and the artful arrangement of limbs. Through her tactic of appropriation and reduction, Shill turns a critical eye on the depiction, positioning, and staging of women in various forms of popular media.

Laura Shill was born in 1980 in Birmingham, Alabama. Shill earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2012 and 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. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Denver.