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.
Compositions such as Tree on Keystone (2011) become hyperreal versions of their real-world equivalents...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
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...
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...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
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...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...