David Evans / Lake District
Fly
‘Photography brings us closer than anything else to the fly, with its faceted eye and the broken line of its flight.’ A brilliant one-liner from Jean Baudrillard draws out similarities between the multiple vision of the fly and the photographer’s tendency to take more than one shot of a subject, a tendency even more pronounced with now pervasive digital equipment. He also sees affinities between the jerky movements of a fly and the photographer restlessly flitting from one subject to another. And implicitly, he mocks those with highfalutin notions about the importance of photography in the grand scheme of things.
It is probably the taken-for-grantedness of the contemporary photographer as fly that explains why we are fascinated by a figure like Thomas Joshua Cooper, lugging archaic, large format equipment to precise and inaccessible destinations like the two Poles or the extremities of the Transatlantic Basin, and returning to ‘Civilization’ with only one image. Needless to say, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Alana Lake don’t have much in common, and she probably doesn’t mind being compared to a fly. She can be a fly in the ointment, or a fly on the wall, and in Afro-American slang fly means sharp and cunning, like Super Fly.
Category
Alana Lake is restless. She will not be what you want her to be. Refusing to be typecast, she does not fit into one of the half dozen or so categories which critics use to traverse contemporary art photography. She could easily fit into several; or all of them; and more besides.
Documentary: Not so long ago you risked being ordered to leave the building if you told your tutor that you were a documentary photographer. But times have changed, especially since Okwui Enwezor’s eleventh Documenta (2002), a celebration of cultural insurrection from the global margins, with documentary photography, still and moving, as a popular medium of choice. Certainly, Alana Lake has no problem with the photograph as record or evidence. Her themes and locations are diverse, including football fans in England, peepshows in Finland, and domestic interiors in Slovakia. There is an ongoing interest in all types of vernacular art. Yet the attention to the tattoos of football fans, or the promotional material around peepshows, suggest a continuous fascination with the visual culture of the heterosexual male.
Theatre: Staged photography experienced a resurgence from the late 1960s onwards. Some of it still seems very fresh, especially work by figures like John Baldessari and Lucas Samaras that often involved quick improvisations with the human body and elementary props. Alana Lake also likes do things with available bits and bobs. A particularly rich series shows an outstretched hand adopting different gestures in front of gaudy prints of exotic birds. It is absolutely obvious that we are not looking at a photograph of an owl perching on a hand, say, or a hand offering water to a vividly coloured parrot. But there are hints of these activities, and the hints are sufficient to set in motion a complex of thoughts about humans, nature and exoticism (Latin exoticus – outside), and the exhausted conventions that are still being used to represent them. Alana Lake is good at making something out of almost nothing.
Sculpture: The maze landscapes involve laser-cut Perspex placed over (and obscuring) the photograph underneath. The piece YOU ME_AN(D) EVERY THING is an image of a semi-precious stone, box framed with mirrored fillets and sand blasted text in Disney-font. And I See Monsters is a series of photographs presented in the shape of a cross. Inventively, Alana Lake seeks to rescue photographs from a fate worse than death – the austere modes of presentation that some museum curators felt was necessary to get photography accepted as a serious aspect of Modernism in the last decades of the 20th Century. Heaven forbid! She wants to be playful.
Lighter
I thought that Lighter was a great title for the Tillmans retrospective, staged fairly recently at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. It refers to his preferred medium: light drawing in all of its forms. It also hints at a lightness of touch that came as a breath of fresh air after the once innovative photo-conceptualism had become ponderous and institutionalized by the start of the 1990s. And when I asked him about the title, he assured me he was also thinking about the cigarette lighter!
Alana Lake can be approached in the light of Wolfgang Tillmans. He studied photography in Bournemouth in the early nineties; she was there more than decade later. Literally, she is after Tillmans. She is also after him in a more profound sense. That is, with Tillmans as a major precedent, she doesn’t have to apologize about wandering, following her inclinations and seeing what happens. Paradoxically, his achievement also allows her to return to the legacy of photo-conceptualism with lightheartedness, rather than fear and loathing.
David Evans edited Appropriation (Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press, 2009) in the new series Documents of Contemporary Art. He is the secretary of the online art journal criticaldictionary.com and is currently editing a book based on the website, to be published by Black Dog in 2011.
Fayann Smith - Friend and collaborator
Blood and spit, bird scratch violence to quiet compassion; my friendship with Alana Lake has been a visceral and intense one. Psychiatrists could say we have "boundary issues" but whether or not the connection is pathological, the lack of a definite line between our two worlds has produced some interesting results. Her totem of the over involved relationship, the two headed chick of Divide and Conquer, is a visual cue to the bizarre reality that can manifest upon enmeshment with another… And what a head I've gotten stuck too! Lake's obsessive, frenetic energy is all consuming and often overwhelming but just as the tornado that transforms the landscape in The Wizard Of Oz compensates for the havoc it wrecks by granting Dorothy access to another realm, sharing Alana's headspace has given me an incredible gift. Lake has elucidated a weird and brilliant new Psychogeography, her photography steals a moment in time and gives it a beauty and an emotional colouring I would not have appreciated alone. Banal instances of modern life have become transcendent in her gaze and easily missed but sublime accidents and formations of nature are captured with an intuitive flair. In our bitchier moments when we have challenged each others status as artists I have critiqued her work harshly, stating that her still life photographs of grass and the like are "dull". Unfortunately for me when I look at her pictures, the patch of grass which had previously held no significance now becomes a strange little environ of its own, teaming with tension and character, stirring within me all kinds of powerful feelings and strange associations. What strange alchemy is this? The girl can turn dirt to to gold and in her hands a camera is something mystic.
Bio
Alana Lake (1981) studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, London graduating in 2009. She has an international exhibitions record showing in London, Milan, Turin, Helsinki and Zurich.
Fly
‘Photography brings us closer than anything else to the fly, with its faceted eye and the broken line of its flight.’ A brilliant one-liner from Jean Baudrillard draws out similarities between the multiple vision of the fly and the photographer’s tendency to take more than one shot of a subject, a tendency even more pronounced with now pervasive digital equipment. He also sees affinities between the jerky movements of a fly and the photographer restlessly flitting from one subject to another. And implicitly, he mocks those with highfalutin notions about the importance of photography in the grand scheme of things.
It is probably the taken-for-grantedness of the contemporary photographer as fly that explains why we are fascinated by a figure like Thomas Joshua Cooper, lugging archaic, large format equipment to precise and inaccessible destinations like the two Poles or the extremities of the Transatlantic Basin, and returning to ‘Civilization’ with only one image. Needless to say, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Alana Lake don’t have much in common, and she probably doesn’t mind being compared to a fly. She can be a fly in the ointment, or a fly on the wall, and in Afro-American slang fly means sharp and cunning, like Super Fly.
Category
Alana Lake is restless. She will not be what you want her to be. Refusing to be typecast, she does not fit into one of the half dozen or so categories which critics use to traverse contemporary art photography. She could easily fit into several; or all of them; and more besides.
Documentary: Not so long ago you risked being ordered to leave the building if you told your tutor that you were a documentary photographer. But times have changed, especially since Okwui Enwezor’s eleventh Documenta (2002), a celebration of cultural insurrection from the global margins, with documentary photography, still and moving, as a popular medium of choice. Certainly, Alana Lake has no problem with the photograph as record or evidence. Her themes and locations are diverse, including football fans in England, peepshows in Finland, and domestic interiors in Slovakia. There is an ongoing interest in all types of vernacular art. Yet the attention to the tattoos of football fans, or the promotional material around peepshows, suggest a continuous fascination with the visual culture of the heterosexual male.
Theatre: Staged photography experienced a resurgence from the late 1960s onwards. Some of it still seems very fresh, especially work by figures like John Baldessari and Lucas Samaras that often involved quick improvisations with the human body and elementary props. Alana Lake also likes do things with available bits and bobs. A particularly rich series shows an outstretched hand adopting different gestures in front of gaudy prints of exotic birds. It is absolutely obvious that we are not looking at a photograph of an owl perching on a hand, say, or a hand offering water to a vividly coloured parrot. But there are hints of these activities, and the hints are sufficient to set in motion a complex of thoughts about humans, nature and exoticism (Latin exoticus – outside), and the exhausted conventions that are still being used to represent them. Alana Lake is good at making something out of almost nothing.
Sculpture: The maze landscapes involve laser-cut Perspex placed over (and obscuring) the photograph underneath. The piece YOU ME_AN(D) EVERY THING is an image of a semi-precious stone, box framed with mirrored fillets and sand blasted text in Disney-font. And I See Monsters is a series of photographs presented in the shape of a cross. Inventively, Alana Lake seeks to rescue photographs from a fate worse than death – the austere modes of presentation that some museum curators felt was necessary to get photography accepted as a serious aspect of Modernism in the last decades of the 20th Century. Heaven forbid! She wants to be playful.
Lighter
I thought that Lighter was a great title for the Tillmans retrospective, staged fairly recently at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. It refers to his preferred medium: light drawing in all of its forms. It also hints at a lightness of touch that came as a breath of fresh air after the once innovative photo-conceptualism had become ponderous and institutionalized by the start of the 1990s. And when I asked him about the title, he assured me he was also thinking about the cigarette lighter!
Alana Lake can be approached in the light of Wolfgang Tillmans. He studied photography in Bournemouth in the early nineties; she was there more than decade later. Literally, she is after Tillmans. She is also after him in a more profound sense. That is, with Tillmans as a major precedent, she doesn’t have to apologize about wandering, following her inclinations and seeing what happens. Paradoxically, his achievement also allows her to return to the legacy of photo-conceptualism with lightheartedness, rather than fear and loathing.
David Evans edited Appropriation (Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press, 2009) in the new series Documents of Contemporary Art. He is the secretary of the online art journal criticaldictionary.com and is currently editing a book based on the website, to be published by Black Dog in 2011.
Fayann Smith - Friend and collaborator
Blood and spit, bird scratch violence to quiet compassion; my friendship with Alana Lake has been a visceral and intense one. Psychiatrists could say we have "boundary issues" but whether or not the connection is pathological, the lack of a definite line between our two worlds has produced some interesting results. Her totem of the over involved relationship, the two headed chick of Divide and Conquer, is a visual cue to the bizarre reality that can manifest upon enmeshment with another… And what a head I've gotten stuck too! Lake's obsessive, frenetic energy is all consuming and often overwhelming but just as the tornado that transforms the landscape in The Wizard Of Oz compensates for the havoc it wrecks by granting Dorothy access to another realm, sharing Alana's headspace has given me an incredible gift. Lake has elucidated a weird and brilliant new Psychogeography, her photography steals a moment in time and gives it a beauty and an emotional colouring I would not have appreciated alone. Banal instances of modern life have become transcendent in her gaze and easily missed but sublime accidents and formations of nature are captured with an intuitive flair. In our bitchier moments when we have challenged each others status as artists I have critiqued her work harshly, stating that her still life photographs of grass and the like are "dull". Unfortunately for me when I look at her pictures, the patch of grass which had previously held no significance now becomes a strange little environ of its own, teaming with tension and character, stirring within me all kinds of powerful feelings and strange associations. What strange alchemy is this? The girl can turn dirt to to gold and in her hands a camera is something mystic.
Bio
Alana Lake (1981) studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, London graduating in 2009. She has an international exhibitions record showing in London, Milan, Turin, Helsinki and Zurich.