Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Lucas Blalock
10
Floor 6 and 95 Horatio Street
Born 1978 in Asheville, NC
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
In his images, Lucas Blalock uses the central tools of photography—the camera as well as Photoshop, which has become ubiquitous in the commercial photography that saturates contemporary life—to explore deceptively simple subjects. When Blalock started using photo editing software, he recalls that the effect of the polished, seamless image seemed “a newly inadequate picture of our world,” prompting him to seek ways to break the conventions of digital manipulation and its pretense of perfection. “I became interested in using it as a tool in the old-fashioned sense, as a magnifier of force and as an extension of the hand,” he has explained. Using Photoshop’s 3-D tools and clone stamp, which allows the user to duplicate part of an image, Blalock has created a sense of dimensional space that interests him because of its uncomfortable, even “antagonistic” relationship to the flat photographic surface and the illusionistic depth of photograph itself.
Blalock's Donkeys Crossing the Desert is presented at 95 Horatio Street, across the street from the Whitney. Visitors can view the work head-on through an app designed by the artist, which introduces a layer of augmented reality (AR) into the work.
Link to App Store (iOS)
Link to Google Play Store (Android)
The Nonconformist, 2017-2019
Lucas Blalock, The Nonconformist, 2017-2019. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum, 83 3/4 × 62 1/8 × 2 1/2 in. (212.7 × 157.8 × 6.4 cm). Image courtesy the artist; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, NY and Zurich; and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels
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Lucas Blalock
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Lucas Blalock: I am Lucas Blalock. I'm an artist, I live in Brooklyn.
These works are really new for me because they are utilizing these 3D tools in Photoshop.
I've been working with this tool recently that allows me to actually inflate part of the image. You can imagine the image surface is flat, and then this tool allows you to take elements of that flat image and blow them up into three dimensions. And this is obviously a virtual three dimensions.
So this is what happened to the bananas. This is how the centers of the eggs became sort of volumetric. And in the third picture is how this strange alien figure is sitting in this ambiguous space on the surface of the image.
My work is really about attempting to relate through the camera, through this technology, to the world. And to draw relationships out of the world that weren't so apparent before, and also to invent in that space.