Lucas Blalock xyz
November 6 - December 23, 2011
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.