Lauren Smith received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Ramapo College of New Jersey in May 2008 with concentrations in Art History and Drawing & Painting. Since graduating she has been incorporating into her work over two years experience in historic preservation architecture.

Lauren is interested in the effects of suburban sprawl on the lower middle class. Her detailed ink drawings collaged on canvas borrow the visual language of architecture to highlight the importance of social responsibility.

Lauren lives and works in Pennington, NJ. She is a 2009 Resident Fellow at Edenfred, in Madison, Wisconsin and a 2010 artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.

I aim to contemplate and explore the decreasing wealth and quality of life of the lower middle class as a result of suburban sprawl. I grew up in a sprawling region in New Jersey, less than ten miles southeast of Philadelphia. I have grown critical of my surroundings and have developed an awareness of how one's environment affects one's future.

Within my obsession with suburban sprawl are several facets of social curiosities. My work often questions real estate consumerism, aesthetics of beauty in architecture, gender relationships, and most glaringly, the importance of social responsibility.

During the two-year period I worked in historic preservation architecture, I developed an inclination towards a specific type of canary tracing paper typically used by architects for sketching. I began to create drawings with this paper by utilizing the visual language of architecture to expose the effects of suburban sprawl.

The content of my work is typically residential architecture. My creative process begins with a physical survey of a given building: I painstakingly record every measurement. I then draw the building to scale in a CAD program. Using ink and marker, I trace the CAD drawings onto tracing paper in high detail. Finally, I use varnish to collage the tracing paper onto canvas. The result is a drawing disguised as a painting.