Pioneer of Feminist performance art exhibits at McIntosh Gallery
January 10, 2012
Suzy Lake Choreographed Puppets #5 1976-77, re-editioned C-print 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
A leading figure of Canadian art whose work influenced a generation of international women artists is the subject of a new exhibition at McIntosh Gallery. Suzy Lake arrives at Western on January 19th for the public opening reception of the exhibition Poetic Politics.
Reflecting the social and political upheaval of the sixties and seventies, the American-born artist has achieved international acclaim for her large-scale photographs and related performances created over the past 40 years. Born in Detroit, Lake moved to Montreal in 1968 where she became active in the conceptualist art scene and was a co-founder of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art Inc.
Combining photography, performance, film and video Lake investigates individual identity as a social construct. Using costumes, make-up and props, she assumes varied identities in her self-portraits. By revealing the artifice of her adopted personas, she dramatizes the self-transformation involved in posing for the camera. Occasionally she would present herself as a specific political figure, such as Patty Hearst. But the major political dimension of her work is its suggestion that femininity is a construct, one that may be socially-imposed, but that is also potentially liberating. In this regard, Lake prefigures her contemporary cultural theorist Camille Paglia (also born in 1947) and fellow Detroit native Madonna.
Lake is now regarded as a pioneer among women artists of the 1970s who influenced a generation of post-modern artists who, like Lake, adapted and adopted multiple histories and identities in their art practices. Roberta Smith of the New York Times notes that Lake’s work “parallels and may precede that of Cindy Sherman.”[i] At a time when abstract painting, typically done by men, was the dominate art form, Lake was one of a group of artists to adopt performance, video and photography in order to explore the politics of gender, the body and identity. Along with Cindy Sherman and fellow performance/ photography artists Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneeman, Lake forged a new world in activist, feminist art.[ii]
In recognition of her seminal role, Lake’s work was included in two major 2007 touring exhibitions about feminism and contemporary art: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1965 – 1980, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake 1972-1978. Lake, who has taught visual art at University of Guelph since 1988, continues to make work about the body, focusing on notions of beauty in the context of a youth-oriented, consumer culture.
Lake’s photo-based and performative explorations of the body and beauty offer a powerful and nuanced investigation into the experience and expression of women’s identities within the context of contemporary political, social and media environments. By performing for her own camera, she politically and aesthetically engages with herself as both subject and object. Lake thus exposes the fraught relations between image and identity that preoccupy much of contemporary art practices.
The University of Toronto Art Centre and the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival organized Suzy Lake: Political Poetics. The accompanying catalogue includes essays by Carla Garnet, Matthew Brower and cultural theorist Dot Tuer. It is available at McIntosh Gallery for $30.
The public is invited to meet Suzy Lake at the exhibition opening reception at 7:30 P.M. on Thursday January 19th. On Friday January 20th Lake will meet with Department of Visual Arts graduate students to discuss their work and will give a public tour of the McIntosh show at 12:30 P.M. The exhibition continues until February 18th.
Gallery information
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