Mendelsohn-Bass, Lauren: - Lauren Mendelsohn-Bass is a Los Angeles born painter who received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work takes the viewer on a journey through the word of superficial reality where artificially alluring and nostalgically innocent context marks darker thought, ideas and actions. Playing on the visual tropes of mass marketing and vintage advertisements, her work explores the ways reality is obscured when presented as ostensibly attractive. As popular culture navigates an era of "fake news", social media, and alternative facts, nothing is as it seems. Her paintings examine today's culture where truth is fluid; ideas issues and events are routinely reframed to reinforce brand, and even daily life is depicted in a series of perfectly posed, edited and filtered images on social media.