Ramiken Crucible
389 Grand Street, New York NYwww.ramikencrucible.comLucas Blalock
Id, Ed, Ad, Od,
Seeking partner. Enjoys presence/absence problems in photographs and both/and situations; plug/hole, over/under, empty/evidentiary, erased/covered. Must be interested in versions. inquiries : September 15 - October 20
Id, Ed, Ad, Od, Lucas Blalock's second exhibition at Ramiken, explores presence and absence as coterminous positions in photographs. By avoiding presence and absence, the photographs in this exhibition do not terminate in cooperative positions. Absence is made present, while the present is absent. Operating together, the pictures in Id, Ed, Ad, Od present an absent position.
Id, Ed, Ad, Od, Blalock's second presence at Ramiken, is absent any photographic position. Avoiding expectations, the photographs in this exhibition do not cooperate. The presence of a present is absent, as is the presence of absence. Operating at odds with the present, the pictures in Id, Ed, Ad, Od become the present.
Id, Ed, Ad, Od
Ramiken
September 2013
Id, Ed, Ad, Od, Blalock's second exhibition at the gallery, explores presence and absence as coterminous positions in photographs. At the heart of discussions around photography this
ASSISTED CAMERA
affirmative!
the picture's surface is interrupted by neither removal nor accumulation interrupts the picture's surface
Blalock utilizes the plug and the hole
over / under
empty / evidentiary
erased / covered
to express both/and situations.
Blalock's picture making is grounded in his continued use of the camera as a device for looking.
- the architecture has been altered
- four pictures occupy the same position (Edge of Town)
This That / see-saw
Several of the works in Id, Ed, Ad, Od have been multiplied in states rather than classic editions. In these compromised editions the photographer is interested in putting pressure on the works to foreground the procedure of their making instead of the painterly gesture of the mouse. [I, II, III, IV, V]
- the pool, both pattern and pond
- No Vacancy
[Umbrella, Hands and Feet, The Guitar Player, Tom's Legs, Staple, Rubber Paper Wood I, Picture for Mark I, The Guitar Player II, Edge of Town ( r r, knife block, self portrait, nus), img724/yellow, ball and chain music, 333 I, Kiddie Pool, This That I, No Vacancy]
Lucas Blalock xyz
November 6 - December 23, 2011
IMAGES
Ramiken presents xyz, a solo exhibition of new work by Lucas Blalock.
Blalock enthusiastically deploys any method that can be used to construct a picture, provided it is contained within the procedural program of photography. Each picture begins on film, shot with a 4x5 camera by the artist; digital interventions follow. Blalock leaves his pictures unprotected from these overlapping strategies, which often contain overly elaborated procedures lifted from the technical production of commercial photography. Patterns merge and mutate, inflected by color corrections that do not correct and masks that do not fit. We see the machine working; the technology that was originally conceived of as invisible is put on stage to act among the intersecting possibilities of the mechanical, the procedural, the historical... Through this apparatus a play is produced that opens out onto uncanny and libidinal economies of physical objects. Blalock’s images could be seen to function in the same way that jokes do for a comedian: they are immediate, and perform themselves while at the same time conjuring the world (the picture and the pictured). In the spirit of a slapstick pratfall, Blalock's work carries on the experiment with humor and absurdity.
[Umbrella, Hands and Feet, The Guitar Player, Tom's Legs, Staple, Rubber Paper Wood I, Picture for Mark I, The Guitar Player II, Edge of Town ( r r, knife block, self portrait, nus), img724/yellow, ball and chain music, 333 I, Kiddie Pool, This That I, No Vacancy]
Blalock works with an assisted camera, which includes the processing capacities (and possibilities) of the computer. These extended capacities have come to haunt our experience of photographs; we ‘look through’ the layers of digital artifice, even if they are customarily made invisible. In Blalock’s pictures, they as often are not.
In this work it is not the triumph of the camera seeing that we feel but the failures of its ability to deliver. The pictorial gestures having already been defeated by fashion, advertising, and the sheer ubiquity of images (not to mention a growing debt to painting), and their corporeality finding its limit in photography’s inevitable remove. This “coming up short” provides a tension populated by empathy, humor and thought.
Lucas Blalock
1 May – 7 July 2013
North Gallery I, Inside the White Cube
Lucas Blalock plays with the conventions of photography by exploring its limits and inherent contradictions. He examines not only the photograph’s subject but also the internal information of its making. Transposing Bertholt Brecht’s theory of alienation into photography by making the mechanics of the tools of production an evident part of the picture, Blalock then forces the viewer to question the conflicting realities set before them and, in turn, the contemporary condition of photography itself.
Blalock’s pictures begin by photographing with an analog view camera and then, like most photographs today, are processed through the computer using Photoshop. Blalock's process is transparent and the marks and gestures left by both him and the computer are clearly visible.
The resultant images can recall conventional portraiture, advertising and landscapes before being subjected to evident digital manipulation. In Coffee Maker (2012) a stove-top espresso maker is digitally redoubled from competing vantage points suggesting a kind of Surrealist aluminium flower, while in Figure (2012) a curled jump rope has been aggressively punctured several times using the Photoshop cloning tool.
Blalock also makes un-manipulated photographs, such as Photo Opportunity (Nina and I) (2009), where the artist and a friend are depicted jovially poking their heads through a cartoon cut-out of a couple dressed in lederhosen and dirndl, a picture that is as absurd as it is tender. This tension, between straight and manipulated conditions, begs new categories and challenges the coherent possibilities of the photographic image.
By creating undecipherable, frequently humorous and sometimes brusque moments in the work, Blalock opens up an unencumbered relationship between viewer and image. Blalock’s pictures leave a residue, acting at once individually and in tandem. In the artist’s words, the images ‘stutter or become guttural or foreign in articulation’ creating their own world of surprises that suggest a larger imagined reality in which we all take part.
Lucas Blalock was born in 1978 in Asheville, North Carolina and lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. In 2013 Lucas will graduate from UCLA with an MFA. Recent exhibitions include ‘New Pictures of Common Objects’ at MoMA PS1, New York (2013); ‘Second Nature: Abstract Photography Then and Now’, at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2012-13)and ‘Towards a Warm Math’, curated by Chris Wiley, On Stellar Rays, New York (2012). Forthcoming solo shows include Ramkien Crucible, New York, September 2013.
Ramiken Crucible
389 Grand Street, New York NYwww.ramikencrucible.com
Ramiken Crucible
389 Grand Street, New York NYwww.ramikencrucible.com