Laura Shill

Laura Shill’s work is a combination of sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Her work addresses ideas of disclosure and concealment, agency and emotional risk, desire and discontent, oscillating between humor and heartbreak.

A primary goal of her practice is to invite participation, whether active or passive, meeting participants where and as they are while making the distinction between spectatorship and participation. She uses everyday materials to make these works, often salvaged from roadsides and thrift stores or scavenged from former iterations of projects to test her theory that anything can be transformed with enough time and attention and care. 

Laura Shill has exhibited work nationally and internationally as a Black Cube Nomadic Museum Fellow at the 57th Venice Biennale European Cultural Center as an official satellite, The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, and Durden and Ray, Los Angeles. Images from her Hidden Mother archive were included in the 2013 Photographers’ Gallery London exhibition, Home Truths, Photography and Motherhood.

For her 2016 solo exhibition, Phantom Touch, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Shill developed a community-based barter system for artistic labor and production to realize an ambitiously soft environment.