Lucas Blalock makes darkly comic photographs that probe discomfiting corners of the psyche while making a bawdy mess of staid photographic norms. His pictures are purposely awkward, ham-fisted, and jury-rigged. They are constructed with software that normally fades into the background, but which he thrusts center stage. Anyone with a rudimentary working knowledge of Photoshop can understand the methods Blalock employs—a jittery fuzz of clone stamping here, an irregular bit of masking there. Indeed, these are not the tricks he has up his sleeve. And this feeling that we can see the gears of the image turning is part of Blalock's program.
Read MoreBlalock was born in 1978 in Asheville, NC, US, and lives and works in New York, NY, US. Blalock participated in New Visions, the inaugural edition of The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, NO (2020); and Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US (2019). Current and recent solo exhibitions include Lucas Blalock in T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N-E, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, US (2021); ...or, Or, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, DE (2019 – 2020); and An Enormous Oar, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, US (2019). Blalock's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, US; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, US; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, US; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, US; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, US.
Text courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber.
