Suzy Lake

Suzy Lake
Suzy Lake outside the Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal, before her 2011 exhibition Reduced Performing
Born (1947-06-24) June 24, 1947
Detroit,
United States
Education Wayne State University, Concordia University
Known for Photography, conceptual art
Website suzylake.ca

Suzy Lake (born June 24, 1947) is an American-Canadian artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, known for her work as a photographer, performance artist and video maker.[1] Using a range of media Lake explores topics including identity, beauty, gender and aging. She is currently represented by Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto, Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, and Galerie Donald Browne in Montreal.

Life

Lake was born June 24, 1947 in Detroit, Michigan.[2] She began her fine art studies at Wayne State University and Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan from 1965 to 1968.[3] During this period she became involved with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s.[4] She also witnessed the Detroit Race Riots of 1967.[4] Soon after in 1968, Lake immigrated to Canada with her husband to escape the Vietnam War draft.[5]

Lake completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University in 1980.[6]

Artistic impact

Using costumes, make-up and props, Lake creates self-portraits for the camera, often by assuming new identities. Her adopted personas highlight the possibilities for deception involved in posing for the camera. An example is "Suzy Lake As Patty Hearst", a project Lake made in collaboration with Bill Jones, featuring the artist as the eponymous Hearst.[7]

Suzy Lake has twenty-five portfolios of her artwork. Each portfolio deals with politics of gender and beauty. She creates art so that she can express how what she does opposed to what she is or what people think she is. Lake mentions that very few working women become artists and there are even fewer women within larger art world that achieve recognition, and she wanted to be the few that did since a straight man walked by her and didn't give her recognition as a photographer because she was a woman. Since the late 1960s, Lake has been critiquing and examining society's ideal of the body, gender and identity. She uses her photographs, videos, and performances to draw attention to the social norms and its constraints. Her goal is to destroy the barrier between the viewer and the artwork.

Lake explained in an interview that her she always used herself in her photographic work, because she wants the viewers to understand that she is constructing in the photographs are her questions for the world. She stated that she would never hire anyone to take part in such work because she wants to keep building/developing her character and have her viewers understand the resistances to social restrictions she has felt in her life that people can empathize with.

Her earlier works, On Stage photos, were influenced by Detroit; she photographed herself as a wife and mother but later she wanted to make her work to reverse that. Lake wanted to use art to show that she had control over her own representation. Moving to Montreal, Lake noticed that there was a marked power difference between genders, and she stated that women have a "glass ceiling" that prevent them from gaining more power as she shows in her Choreographed Puppet photos. In her late 1960s, Lake still didn't stop making artwork because she wanted to connect to younger viewers so she introduced a new vision of beauty by displaying her older body in her portfolio, "Beauty and the Aging Body."

Early work

Lake moved to Montreal, and lived there for about ten years.[8] She taught at the Montreal Museum School (1969–1978) and was mentored by the Minimalist artist, Guido Molinari. She was active in the early conceptualist art scene in that city. In 1971, Lake became a co-founder, with twelve other artists, of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art Inc.[2][9] Lake's work during this period was influenced by fellow "camera artists" in Véhicule (including Les Levine) who were using the camera to represent an idea as opposed to documenting reality.[5] This was also a period when Lake began concentrate on the subject of identity in her works. In her series of photographs entitled A One Hour (Zero) Conversation with Allan B. made in 1973, she becomes the subject as a camera records her expression at various intervals of a candid conversation with a friend.[10] To emphasize her gestures, Lake used white make-up to cover her face.[10] She then invited her friends and family to circle the photographs in the series most represented her personality.

In an interview in Magenta magazine, Lake noted the influence of the political climate of the 1970s on her work, saying: "I know that I am a feminist, but I can see that my politics originated in human rights issues, civil rights, the FLQ in Quebec and race issues in the States."[11] In 2006, Roberta Smith of the New York Times compared her work to that of Cindy Sherman;[12] however, Thomas Micchelli, reviewing the feminist collection of the Vienna-based Verbund AG for Hyperallergic.com asserts that Lake was an influence on the latter in school.[13] Regardless, the two artists were contemporaries in the 1970s; in 1975 Lake was invited by Sherman to exhibit in a Hallwalls show.[14] Today, she continues to make work about the body focusing on issues of ageing, and exhibiting her work worldwide.

Major exhibitions

Lake was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective exhibition, Introducing Suzy Lake, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014-15.[15][16][17] As well as being the recipient of the 2016 Scotiabank Photograpy Award resulted in another survey exhibition curated by Gaëlle Morel at the Ryerson Image Center (RIC) in Toronto, in accordance to the 2017 Contact Photography Festival.

Honours

She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.[18] In 2016, she was recipient of Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.[19] and the Scotiabank Photography Award.[20]

She has been represented by Galerie Gilles Gheerbrant (1974–1977); Jared Sable Gallery (1976–1990), and Paul Petro Contemporary Art (1995 – 2012). Lake is currently represented by Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto (2012 - ); Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles (2009 – ); Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal (2010 - ).

Bibliography

Catalogues

  • Suzy Lake: Concealment/Revealment, (2006), Hallwalls Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.
  • Attitudes et comportements, curator Jocelyn Fortin, Suzy Lake (2002) ISBN TR647 L35 2002
  • Suzy Lake: Points of Reference by Martha Hanna (1993) ISBN 0-88884-564-2, ISBN 978-0-88884-564-1
  • Suzy Lake: authority is an attribute, part II (1992) ISBN 0-920810-48-9, ISBN 978-0-920810-48-4
  • Suzy Lake: are you talking to me? (1980) OCLC: N6545 V353
  • For Suzy Lake, Chris Knudsen, and Robert Walker (1978) OCLC: 83615339
  • Suzy Lake (1975) ISBN 0-919890-02-4

Selected books/journals

  • Radical Gestures: Feminist Performance Art in the US and Canada, 1970's to c.2000, by Jayne Wark (2006) ISBN 0-7735-2956-X
  • Carte Blanche, a compendium of Canadian photography (2006) ISBN 0-9739739-0-0, ISBN 978-0-9739739-0-7
  • Point & Shoot: Performance and Photography, France Chouiniere and Michele Theriault eds. (2005) ISBN 978-2-922135-26-8
  • Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art By Canadian Women, by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars (2004) ISBN 0-920397-84-0, ISBN 978-0-920397-84-8
  • Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography since 1955, by Penny Cousineau-Levine (2003) ISBN 0-7735-2826-1, ISBN 978-0-7735-2826-0
  • From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, by Lucy Lippard (1976) ISBN 0-525-47427-7, ISBN 978-0-525-47427-2

Selected exhibitions

Selected public collections

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Suzy Lake". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
  2. 1 2 "Suzy Lake", in Contemporary Canadian Artists, Gale Canada, 1997, editor Roger Matuz
  3. ↑ Hanna, Martha (1993). Suzy Lake: Point of Reference. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. p. 1. ISBN 0-88884-564-2.
  4. 1 2 "Suzy Lake". Ryerson University, School of Image Arts. 2000-01-28. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
  5. 1 2 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles, California: The MIT Press. 2007. p. 258. ISBN 0914357999.
  6. ↑ "Suzy Lake: Studio Art". School of fine Arts And Music. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  7. ↑ Karen White (1947-06-14). "Suzy Lake". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  8. ↑ Reid, Robert, "Immersing herself in the work". Kitchener Waterloo Record, 13 February 1999 (clipping - page number needed.
  9. ↑ "P027 – Véhicule Art (Montréal) Inc. fonds | Concordia University Archives". Archives3.concordia.ca. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  10. 1 2 Hanna, Martha (1993). Suzy Lake: Point of Reference. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. p. 6. ISBN 0-88884-564-2.
  11. ↑ "Suzy Lake: Renaissance Woman". Magenta Magazine. 2010-11-29. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  12. ↑ "Art in Review", THE NEW YORK TIMES, Roberta Smith, February 3, 2006
  13. ↑ https://hyperallergic.com/380348/woman-feminist-avant-garde-of-the-1970s-sammlung-verbund-mumok-2017/
  14. ↑ Gaasch, Cynnie (2006-01-19). "When Everything Old is New Again: Suzy Lake at Hallwalls". Artvoice.com. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  15. ↑ Uhlyarik, Georgiana, ed. (2014). Introducing Suzy Lake. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario. ISBN 9781908966735.
  16. ↑ Everett-Green, Robert. "Suzy Lake AGO retrospective follows artist's diverse, four-decade-long career". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  17. ↑ Chase, Alisia. "Exhibition review: Introducing Suzy Lake". Afterimage. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  18. ↑ "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Archived from the original on 26 May 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  19. ↑ "The Canada Council for the Arts - Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts". ggavma.canadacouncil.ca. Archived from the original on 2016-03-11. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
  20. ↑ Scotiabank Photography Award http://www.scotiabank.com/photoaward/en/0,,6336,00.html
  21. ↑ "Suzy Lake: Political Poetics". Utac.utoronto.ca. 2011-06-25. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  22. ↑ "DONNA: FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE OF THE 1970s". e-flux. 2010-03-01. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  23. ↑ "Justina M. Barnicke Gallery: Traffic | Hart House — University of Toronto". Harthouse.ca. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  24. ↑ "identity theft: eleanor antin, lynn hershman, suzy lake, 1972-1978". Smmoa.org. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  25. ↑ http://www.moca.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?id=373
  26. ↑ "The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-1976)". Tfaoi.com. 2004-08-01. Retrieved 2012-08-05.
  27. ↑ http://ccca.concordia.ca/cv/english/lake-cv.html
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