Exhibition Review: Deana Lawson, Centropy
Deana Lawson, Chief, 2019. Pigment print. © Deana Lawson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Collective histories, mythic symbols, corporeality and Black diasporic identities – these are some of the unifying threads running through the works of Deana Lawson, winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2020 and the first photographer to receive the prestigious award for contemporary art. Her visionary pictures, according to the jury, offer a “compelling new mode of seeing and imagining.” As part of the prize, the Guggenheim Museum is presenting the solo exhibition Deana Lawson, Centropy to feature new works that reflect recent developments in the artist’s thinking and practice.
While the word “entropy” is a thermodynamic concept defined by its chaotic instability and decay, “centropy” implies the opposite: regeneration and energies gathering in harmonious order. The exhibition’s installation draws on the latter idea, arranging large-scale photographs in a constellation that encircles the spectral rendering of a torus. Its title also serves as a fitting metaphor for the type of spiritual energy and creative renewal that Lawson explores. Fusing social documentary with the family album, her photographs powerfully reclaim the Black subject as – in her own words – “creative, godlike beings.” Her exposure comes at a timely, if not long overdue, moment for opening up new ways of visualizing and imagining global Black culture.
In “Barrington and Father,” a new work included in the exhibition, a topless young man with a muscular torso and smooth, tattoo-covered skin stands next to his elegantly dressed senior. Both men assume a self-assured posture, their unwavering gazes fixed on the viewer. The celebratory light in which Lawson captures her subjects is common to her works of portraiture. Influenced by the aesthetics and intergenerational bonds of the Black diaspora, she has photographed intriguing individuals both in New York and abroad. Though her sitters are mostly strangers whom she encounters or seeks out, Lawson perceives her works as the process of building “an ever-expanding mythological extended family.”
Deana Lawson, Barrington and Father, 2021. Pigment print, 73 3/4 × 57 7/8 in. (187.3 × 147 cm). © Deana Lawson, courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
While they may appear spontaneous, bearing the ethos of street photography, her portraits are highly staged tableaus that draw from a rich mixture of vernacular, mythical, art-historical and material traditions. She uses the body to construct a literary narrative that destabilizes familiar ways of seeing and pushes our vision beyond the mundane. “Lawson’s images are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between spaces of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion,” reads the Guggenheim’s press release.
Photography seems to take on a mystical character for Lawson – generating a transcendental power that radiates off the bodies in her pictures to touch the viewer. She traces her fascination with the intersection between the spiritual and the profane to “Portal,” a photograph of a damaged couch on which a triangular section (“Africa-shaped” according to the writer Zadie Smith) has been ripped away from the leather covering to reveal a bottomless black hole underneath. For Lawson, this portal represents an entry into the realm of the surreal which she trains herself to access and recreate through her photographs.
Deana Lawson, Young Grandmother, 2019 © Deana Lawson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
In Centropy, Lawson continues to play with the dynamic exchange of energies. Placing her images in mirrored frames that create a loop of reflection, a practice she has started to experiment with recently, Lawson materializes the interaction between her subjects and the viewer. The mirrors hint at the presence of an in-between space, where those who see meets those that are seen. She also collaborated with fellow artist Matthew Schreiber to develop holograms, which are then embedded in several works in the exhibition. Able to reproduce three-dimensional images of objects, the technique interests Lawson by making visible various perspectives and angles that are not accessible in flat photos. The new methods suggest a natural progression from her fascination with the “miracle of light” which, to Lawson, sustains both photography and life itself.
The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy will be open from May 7 – October 11, 2021.
