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Lauren Seiden recasts graphite—a traditional drawing medium—into sculptural form, foregrounding drawing as labor, repetition, and material transformation. Through obsessive, manual mark-making with pencil, she burnishes surfaces until graphite compresses into a reflective sheen. The reflective surface is not applied but accumulated—an index of time and sustained pressure.

Seiden destabilizes hierarchies between drawing and sculpture, surface and depth, permanence and erosion. Working with domestic and utilitarian objects, she examines systems of maintenance embedded in everyday life. Graphite operates simultaneously as image, mirror, and residue—both revealing and obscuring the gestures that produced it.

Her installations often evolve durationally, allowing gravity, evaporation, and environmental conditions to complete the work. By highlighting subtle material change, Seiden asks: what sustains stability, and what happens when maintenance ceases? Her practice makes visible the labor required to preserve order, while exposing the quiet transformations that occur when that labor is withdrawn.

Lauren Seiden is a Brooklyn based artist who has exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide including The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Weisman Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Nosco, Brussels, Belgium; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Lyles & King Gallery, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Maccarone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Museum PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, Germany. She has been reviewed and featured in ArtForum, Modern Painters, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, WideWalls, Art in America, and many others. Her work resides in numerous public and private collections.

contact : lauren.r.seiden@gmail.com