Lucy Black 

BIO
WHO IS LUCY BLACK, SHE WAS BORN IN A CAVE AROUND 143BC. SHE WAS PRIMARILY RAISED MY WOLVS UNTILL THE 1840’S WHEN A GROUP OF HUNTERS TOOK HER. SHE THEN WAS TRAINED IN VICTORIAN WAYS.  IN 1850 MARRIED LORD KNIGHT KING CHARLES BUT WAS SHORTLY INSTITUTIONALIZED DUE TO WOMEN “HYSTARIA”. SHE WAS RELIEST IN THE 1920’S AND WALKED FROM SYBRIA TO PARIS WHERE SHE HAS BEEN LVING EVER SINCE.

Lucy Black was born in the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1996. She attended a Waldorf education, which stresses imagination and the immersion in nature. All learning is conveyed through a story, even math, and a heavy concentration of mythology. Lucy is still impacted by her early education of myth making and the visual language that comes along with it. Her art practice is still influenced by the pictures that show up in her head while hearing a story, fuling the majority of her images.

    Lucy Black studied at Paris College of Art and graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts in 2020. Her medium mostly lies in photography and processing all of her photos in the dark room, using alternative techniques like solarization, scratching and bending the negative and creating stesils and masks, making each print unique. She uses the facets of theater to tell a visceral story. She is involved in the staging of each photograph, incorporating set pieces and handmade props.

ARTIST STATEMENT

    My work aims to tell a story by subverting reality in a photograph. Influenced by the world of theatre–sets, costumes, props, characters and lighting–I create forms and scenes both rational and irrational, familiar yet absurd, I then compress these opposites by a trick of the light in the darkroom, producing a photograph scene. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.

    My earlier photography put into play narratives within natural, pre-existing environments. Recently, the environment has changed to an invented one. This constructed world has been stripped bare in order to create a sense of void – a space without context. Using black backdrops and darkroom manipulation, my current photos take place in a theatrical void, bringing about the suspension of disbelief .

    I create ‘tchotchkes’, objects and prosthetics, to be used as props in the photographic scene. Latex, tape, foil, hair and trash; these are materials which make up the objects. In some scenes, these objects function as prosthetics attached to the body, while in others they exist alone, *acting* as their own character. I use mold-making to borrow forms directly from the human body. I disrupt the purity and the convention of the mold in  my use of more ad hoc material processes. The juxtaposition of the hand-made body parts against the unmanipulated human body evokes a sense of disembodiment or dissociation, interfering with the rational minds familiarity of the human figure.

    My practice is one of experimentation, I use whatever materials necessary to achieve the photograph or object I have imagined. This experimentation is present in all stages of my process, from the creation of theatrical environments, the improvisation of enacting the scene on 120mm film, all the way to the developing and printing of the physical photograph in the darkroom. The final result compresses these stages on the flat surface of the photo. Working in the darkroom is an integral part of my process as it allows me to construct and deconstruct an image. I isolate certain parts of a developing image by making stencils or masks from other photographic scenes. The manipulation of the light allows me to reveal and conceal, guiding the viewer’s eye like that of a theatrical spotlight.

    Along with the photos a set of boxes are shown. The ‘void’ is represented by these boxes. The box does not represent confinement but rather a decontextualized space. I use my ad hoc nature to construct miniature boxes in which I place tiny photos, only accessible to the viewer by looking through peepholes. . The box is a place my photo can exist in a darkness, like a tiny theater scene, taken as a still, then three dimensionally realized. By disrupting the scale of a space, these works challenge the viewers’ own sense of their body and their physical perspective, thus invoking within the viewer a dissociative voyeuristic experience.

                                                                                   


                                                                                    Home