nca | nichido contemporary art

Venue: nca | nichido contemporary art
Date: 10.6 (fri.) – 11.1 (sat.), 2023
Gallery hours: tue. – sat. / 11:00 – 19:00 （closed on sun., mon., and on national holidays）*Open during “Art Week Tokyo” (hours are as above)　

nca | nichido contemporary art × 7CHOME OTA FINE ARTS
Joint reception: 11/2 2023 (Thur.) 16:00 – 18:00 *artist in attendance

Embracing the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht who firmly believed that theater should bring the offstage labor on stage through his work, Blalock makes a point in showing the process behind photographic images by shooting with a large-format camera on film and scanning his images before digitally alter them. By so doing, Blalock’s awkward alterations give life to surreal and darkly comic imagery. It feels as if by addressing photography as, borrowing the artist’s own words, “an act of drawing, a way to try to understand the world through making a picture of it”, Blalock is pushed to investigate the limits and inherent contradictions of such a medium. The exhibition presents the artist’s new body of work, along with a
selection of his more representative pieces.
 

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Lucas Blalock’s works are created through a process of retouching and editing of previously taken photos using Photoshop tools.
This work has a foot in collage, an activity that can be traced back to the avant-garde of the early 20th century: Surrealists used techniques of juxtaposition assembling black-and-white print-outs to bring forth an otherworldly dimension; Cubists used foreign objects, applied directly to the canvas, as a tool to subvert the rules of perspective at work on the picture plane, exposing the truth of such assumptions by evoking literal flatness. Later, Pop Art artists employed collage as a way to represent their time where the overwhelming amount of information circulating in the form of advertisement took the stage becoming, at times, the subject of paintings.
Patching together different images is not just about cutting and pasting strips of paper. The technique of multiple exposure on film paved the way to both photo and video montage since their early years.
Then, what is the difference that lays between traditional collage practices and montage techniques, on one side, and collage in Photoshop on the other?
In traditional collage, where cut sections are a fixed feature, the layered structure resulting from the overlapping of pieces of a given material and the almost imperceptible thickness of each piece can be traced on the surface. We are then able to recognize the fragmentary identity of collage, resulting in that mix of cut sections and strips of paper.
Montage on film is surely closer to digital images if we take into consideration the flat nature of film as a material.
However, the flat surface is a physical object itself, thus it creates a lingering sense of incongruity, as a result of the merging of multiple focal points and exposures, and the montage of awkward cut sections.
The Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop allows to extract a portion from the same image and to automatically replace the missing pixels. That portion is then copied reproducing every single aspect of the original - from the color levels, to the overall lighting, focal distance and tone correction – without showing any cut section.
It is an excellent editing tool which, in the hands of a skillful operator, is often used to eliminate an unwanted part of a given image.
Blalock, however, employs this tool purposely leaving the retouching process visible on the surface.
His aim is to expose how digital images can be manipulated today. His unveiling act, however, does not want to draw a parallel between the artist and those, for instance, who seek to expose injustice or, yet, who seem to know the truth of this world. Rather simply, Blalock behaves as if the altered image has always been there, all along part of this world; an allusion to complexity. In his work, Blalock makes also extensive use of both the Selection and the Brush tool, mainly playing around with the basic round-brush options.
At times, the standard circle can present a well-defined, clear outline, at others evenly smooth, soften edges when the anti-aliasing option is selected. In either case, the circle is going to be perfectly round and the smoothing effect perfectly even The remaining mark is a perfect circle that no traditional brushstroke, bound to the physical nature of the act that enables it, would ever be able to reproduce. And yet, within the realm of digital images, the brush’s physicality and blur effect become real at last, thanks to a rather sophisticated imitation process that does rely on a very simple set of actions.
With Clone Stamp too, borders can be either well-defined or blurred. While the well-balanced harmony of the whole ensemble allows the newly copied portion to blend in even when working with clear borders, the blurred-line copy too blends in just as well, increasingly appearing to the human eye, at first, as a natural shape.
Yet, taking a careful look, something seems to be a little off. It is a feeling somewhere between existential discomfort and cozily wandering in a dream.
That’s it then, the use of digital tools puts on display the loss of physicality, weight, and gravity.
Blalock’s ambiguously light-hearted images show the impalpable dimension that such tools inherently possess and put that dimension into a direct relationship with our embodied beings.
The humor that his works seem to be pulling away from is actually the glue that holds them together.

gnck (Art Critic)

Lucas Blalock
(b. 1978, Asheville, North Carolina, USA; currently lives and works in New York, USA)
2013 MFA, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA USA
2011 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME USA
2002 BA, Photography, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY USA
Main Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions: Potemkin Village, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2023) / Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Canada (2022) / Lucas Blalock in T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N-E, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts (AEIVA), Burmingham (2021) / Florida, 1989, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2021) / Insoluble Pancakes, rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2020) / Lucas Blalock ... or, Or, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2019) / Lucas Blalock: An Enormous Oar, ICA, Los Angeles, U.S. (2019).
Main Group Shows: Sausage Party”, rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2022) / We didn’t ask permission, we just did it…, CAM St. Louis, St. Louis, U.S. (2022) / Objects of Desire, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, U.S. (2022) / Treasury and Laboratory: 25 Years Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2022) / Interior Scroll or What I Did on My Vacation, organized by Soft Network, Stanley and Sons, The Art Building, Springs, New York (2021) / New Visions, The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Med, Høvikodden, Norway, (2020) / The Extreme Present, organised by Jeffery Deitch and Larry Gagosian, Moore Building, Miami (2019) / Whitney Biennale 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019) / You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred, Curated by Paul Luckraft, MAMM, Moscow (2018)