Built to Remember

Lauren Selden’s Built to Remember gathers the architectures that have shaped her life; structures she once moved through, lived within, or looked up at, and returns them to the viewer as distilled memories. Hand-formed from metal and wax, the sculptures are both intimate and architectural, offering a quiet study in how a place embeds itself inside of us.

Many of Selden’s house sculptures rise from thin pillars, small podiums of elevation that signal both vulnerability and foresight. This design echoes a long history of U.S. architecture where coastal homes are raised to brace against rising waters, an image that feels increasingly foreboding in our era of climatic and emotional precarity. The result is a kind of suspended doom, softened by the familiarity of the forms themselves.

These buildings, modeled after places she’s lived, including dorms, public housing, and modest rentals, are meant to be unifying. Their universal shapes and humble materials invite viewers to find echoes of their own past dwellings. Selden’s deep dive into American architecture and the economic divides it reveals surfaces here as lived experience rather than theory. The houses feel worn, protective, a little weary. They stand as quiet memorials to life’s fragilities.

Across the gallery, her hand-fabricated metal flowers from the Invasive Species series offer a different but related meditation. Emerging from rigid sculptural bases, the flowers lean slightly, almost shy, creating an intimacy between viewer and object. Each delicate stem becomes a solitary encounter, isolated and achingly individual. Their weed-like posture suggests strength within limitation, a gentle insistence on living despite the structures that confine them.

Together, the houses and flowers create a landscape of memory and endurance. Elevated dwellings, rising waters, institutional rooms, and small blooms that refuse erasure, Built to Remember is a tender study of how our environments mark us, and what we build within ourselves to stay standing.