Issue No. 28 – Control

What is the nature of control? The desire for it—and to be free of it—are essential parts of both life and art.

LUCAS MICHAEL - POLAROIDS

PROJECT ROOMLUCAS MICHAEL - POLAROIDS SEPTEMBER 12 - OCTOBER 26, 2013 DANZIGER GALLERY

Lucas Michael lives and works in New York. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina he is a performer, painter, sculptor, and photographer. His work has shown at the Getty Center and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bahia Blanca. This fall Danziger Gallery is pleased present Lucas Michael: Polaroids.

Long intrigued with the work of Andy Warhol, Lucas Michael began to shoot with the Polaroid Bigshot Camera in 2005, the same camera used by Warhol for the photographs he took in preparation for his commissioned portraits and other paintings. Michael reassigns the technique, equipment, and style, to the twenty-first century capturing today’s Hollywood icons and re-conceptualizing selected Warhol works in video as well as Polaroid.

For his first exhibition at Danziger Gallery, Michael combines three different bodies of work. The first, “Golden Globes” (2013), features modern muses from Daniel Day Lewis to Jennifer Lawrence all shot for New York Magazine against a white background backstage at the famous awards ceremony. These miniature portraits eerily capture Warhol’s star worshiping and re-animate and resuscitate the Warholian obsession with fame and glamour.

The second body of work “Ladies and Gentlemen” (2005 – 2013), is Michael’s appropriation of Warhol’s seminal body of work of the same name. Following the layout of Warhol’s book, Michael recreates the images shot by shot and page by page but with a cast of mostly female contemporary artists standing in for Warhol’s transvestites. In this way with women playing men playing women, Michael creates a new dialog about image and identity that is both playful and thought provoking.

Lastly, “Six Appearing Acts” (2004), a twelve and a half minute video, explores the symbolic power of the Polaroid and photography’s relationship to voyeurism. In this work – six Polaroid images are placed before the viewer as they develop. Each ”act” is an attempt to repeat the previous but the impossibility of the task and the emergence of the figurative through the abstract create their own anti-narrative.

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