Deana Lawson, Artist
Wednesday, October 22, 12:30 pm
Deana Lawson’s work negotiates knowledge of selfhood through a corporeal dimension. Her photographs speak to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, on the body. Lawson utilizes a wide spectrum of photographic languages: staged imagery, loose documentary, appropriated pictures given to her by her subjects, or images she discovers in the media. These different modes of photographic production, whether staged or found, feed into the ongoing narratives that Lawson engages. As musician and critic Greg Tate wrote recently, “What you see in [Lawson’s] work is photographer as cultural anthropologist but also as cultural vivisectionist and forensic curator. Her practice subtly contests the suppression of Black visual epistemologies–as much through absence as presence, withheld information as much cultural saturation bombing. Drawing the spectators eye to how people command space within the frame, how they proclaim ownership of selfhood before the camera is a recurring motif. Her work seems always about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order.” Read more …
Other events in the series
*All events are free and open to the public
LAURA LETINSKY, Artist
Thursday, October 9, 12:30pm
ARTHUR OU, Artist
Thursday, October 16, 12:30pm
LISA OPPENHEIM, Artist
Thursday, November 6, 12:30pm
JEFF WHETSTONE, Artist
Thursday, November 13, 12:30pm
DYANNA TAYLOR, Film Director
“Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning”
Sunday, November 16, 4:30pm
RICHARD STREET, Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies
“Photographer’s Double / Searching for Cover”
Monday, November 17, 4:30pm
