ART CITIES:N York-Lucas Blalock

The eccentric, surreal images of Lucas Blalock are products of both analogue and digital technologies. Using a large-format camera, he takes photographs of still lifes, domestic scenes, or, occasionally, portraits, that he scans and digitally modifies. Taking cues from Bertolt Brecht’s advocacy for revealing the mechanics of theatre production, Blalock creates works that intentionally proclaim his skills on a computer—that declare his working process instead of hiding it.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gallery Eva Presenhuber Archive

Lucas Blalock has emerged as one of a new generation of photographers, a group largely concerned with issues of image scale, speed, and physicality in a time when the medium’s relationship to these conditions is becoming increasingly complicated. Using his characteristic clunky editing style, Blalock brings the behind-the-scenes labor of the picture to the forefront and invites us to question aspects of image production that we otherwise take for granted. And he does so with a great deal of humor, allowing for many entries into his work. In “Florida, 1989”, Lucas Blalock presents photography and sculpture. In “The Floridian (Urodisny)” a sun-drenched wooden tabletop supports a notecard scrawled with childish waveforms resting beneath a sail-shaped piece of pointed metal on which an undulating flamingo-pink object is skewered, evoking Florida’s sun and sand with a slapdash economy of means. Similarly, in “Pool Music” Blalock has festooned an empty swimming pool tucked behind a middle-of-the-road Art Deco hotel with a scattered collection of Photoshopped musical notes, a gesture that radiates cloying, insincere good cheer. On the flip side are works like “Perforated Landing I” a creepy, dilapidated stairwell punctured with peepholes that look out onto patchwork of colorful materials, suggesting that we are being given a peek behind the scenes of a world of artifice, where things are much darker than they appear on the outside. Interspersed with this scenery are nods toward the unseemly realities of the body—its frailties, its unruliness, its horror—that have been commonplace in Blalock’s work for years, return here freighted with additional psychic weight. His three kinetic sculptures, dubbed “Film-Objects” due to their comically impoverished resemblance to proto-cinematic 19th-century zoetropes, which often depicted human or animal bodies in dynamic, eye-catching motion, ironically point to the body in a state of torpor or death. In other works, objects serve as stand-ins for states of psychosexual distress, like the limp, uncooked hotdog in “Single Father” the hirsute medical brace in “Hairy Armature” and the sickeningly slick-surfaced, vulva-like object in “Rubber Dog Toy Insides, multigraph”, a chew toy in the shape of a hotdog that has been cut open and turned inside out, photographed using another popular piece of 19th-century optical trickery. Redolent of the universally relatable shock of puberty, these works suggest that the loss of his appendage became queasily linked to the body’s more natural upheavals. The show is also populated by a bizarre cast of animal familiars and ghostly entities. These kinds of characters have popped up in Blalock’s work before, but they are similarly inflected with new flavors of meaning in the context of this exhibition’s autobiographical turn. For instance, creatures like the disturbingly bulbous-tongued tiger in “Bleep” or the cartoonishly phallic squirrel in “Squirrel, multigraph”, seem like they could be members of a troupe like the dwarfs in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), if they hailed from a bizzaro Disney universe where libidinal forces were allowed to run wild, rather than remain repressed.

Photo: Lucas Blalock, Reverse Titanic / Hell is in the Air, 2019, Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 150 x 175.5 cm / 59 x 69 inches, © Lucas Blalock, Courtesy the artist and Gallery Eva Presenhuber

Info: Gallery Eva Presenhuber, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, Duration: 27/2-10/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 1:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com