Lauren Fedorchak's Projects

MFA Student

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2019

Artist Statement:

As a youth, photographer, Lauren Fedorchak struggled with being overweight. Thinking that this advice would alleviate the issue, her grandmother told her to toast bread twice, implying that by burning it, there would be less caloric intake. This is one example of the strange and confounding incidents that she experienced growing up.

Toast the Bread Twice, 2019, is a series of black and white prints that investigates the idea that trauma is inherited through genetics and environmental factors. Through her photographic explorations and the use of several camera formats, Fedorchak photographs places which hold a deep resonance to her family’s history, objects that are representational, and her mother, sister, and herself as people who have suffered from the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Within the images, the past and present are suggested without indication of an actual timeframe. The timelessness of the images supports a level of uncertainty both within the imagery and also within the dynamics of family. Through her photographic vision, Fedorchak constructs a cryptic narrative, exposing unpleasant memories and secrets, kept hidden, until now.

Biography:

Lauren Fedorchak is an analog photographer currently living in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, the former home of a large Kodak film processing plant. Her photographic endeavors have ranged from the experimental to the ostensibly traditional. Learning the craft with toy cameras during her photographic infancy, she became interested in camera design and production, eventually building several pinhole and fixed-focus, lens-based cameras. While she vacillates between many different cameras and film formats, her visual pursuits remain steadfast in their documentary and exploratory nature. Searching for the past within the every day and attempting to preserve the ephemeral are thematic forefronts to Fedorchak’s artistic practice.

Her current photographic work explores the psychological complexities of inherited trauma in her life and in the lives of her mother and sister; having been raised and influenced by the family matriarch, a survivor of the Holocaust. Through a combination of portraiture, still life, and
landscape photographs, Fedorchak takes inspiration from her family’s history and collective memory to form her photographic oeuvre.  

Fedorchak received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts from Ramapo College of New Jersey in 2014 and is a current MFA candidate at Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, where she is expected to receive her Masters in Studio Art in May 2019.