Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay. Within the dark obscurity of three, three, three (2013), he frustrates and complicates this conditioned response to the photographic medium, questioning the photograph’s purpose.
Lucas Blalock received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. In his photographic work he fuses analog and digital technologies, relying on both the tactility of a four-by-five camera and the wide-open possibilities of digital manipulation. While many makers of photographic images may use digital tools while simultaneously burying the fact of that use, Blalock makes his manipulations evident.
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...