A up to date images exhibition – by Tatum Dooley

This review was originally published in Dear Dave Magazine

When I first walked into Stephen Bulger Gallery to see Joan Lyons’s retrospective exhibition, I exclaimed with out a lot thought: These are so modern!

A very inane assertion on my half, for a lot of causes. First, Joan Lyons is a up to date artist who continues to make work into her 80s. Secondly, the work I used to be referring to was made in 1973, not the 1700s. And lastly, why would one thing being “contemporary” essentially be a praise?

I assume what I meant is that there’s an everlasting high quality to the work. Photography, at its finest, can seize one thing elementary in regards to the human situation. This is strictly what Lyons does. I take a look at her images, and I see myself, regardless of the half-century of time between us. Whether a irritating dialog with a male physician, a jacket that I might see myself sporting, or the faces of a girl staring unwaveringly on the digital camera—there I’m.

In “Xerox Transfer Drawings: Women’s Portrait Series,” which spanned from 1972-1980, Lyons got down to seize historic representations of ladies, by girls. Through a number of transfers of the Xerox machine—I recall creating related portraits as a younger woman visiting my mother at work—a single picture is constructed. “They are not naturalistic, but awkward in gesture, immobile and flattened—women frozen in their representations,” writes Lyons within the accompanying description of the work. “They countermand the idea of a photographic portrait as the record of a fleeting moment. In the 1970s, I was seeking to find myself as a woman within my culture and to locate my art practice within the history of artmaking.”

In these images, the picture aircraft is skewed at an unnatural angle. It’s like gravity doesn’t exist. The portraits really feel shut, as if the our bodies are pressed up towards the opposite facet of the glass. The lack of any telling historic or geographic data in these photos creates an artifact that exists outdoors of time.

Lyons writes that she was curious about “constructing,” fairly than “taking,” {a photograph}. This building of a photographic picture is central to most, if not all, of Lyons’s work. Her exhibition at Stephen Bulger Gallery by February 28 seems like a journey by the historical past of images.

Lyons wasn’t treasured about what digital camera she used or pledged a relentless allegiance to at least one model. Instead, she used numerous methods and tools—together with Xerography, screen-printing, Diazo paper, large-format Polaroids, digital cameras and pinhole images—as a solution to talk. Through the quirks and options of every, Lyons leans into the medium’s makes use of and misuses, wielding the digital camera to finest seize not solely the fact of life but in addition its undercurrents of emotion.

About her sequence of large-scale Polaroids from 1980, Lyons writes: “ ‘Presences’ is an investigation of photographic portraiture. The images have a lot to do with multiple selves and with faces as masks. In these long exposures, bodies move, and backgrounds are stationary.” The photos are jarring at instances; my thoughts can’t compute how they had been achieved. A face is barely disfigured with movement or seemingly collaged collectively. In one other, a girl within the foreground is oversaturated and blurry, whereas the background is crisply in focus and effectively saturated. The mix of abstraction and realism compresses time. These images usually are not snapshots meant to seize a single second. By shunning this model of seize, they seize one thing extra viscerally near the weird actuality of life.

I couldn’t assist however {photograph} myself inside the unfavourable area of one of many Polaroid images, layering my face on prime of the themes. A masks on a masks. {A photograph} of {a photograph}. Another layer of historical past.

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