Suzy Lake

Socially and politically engaged, Suzy Lake’s work questions representations in doubt, confronting stereotypes and cultural assumptions with its relationship to the world. Bringing together a selection of masterpieces and focused works, most of which have never been shown in Europe, this exhibition will put into perspective a poetically politicized and sensitive body of works produced over nearly fifty years.
Born Suzanne Marx in 1947 in Detroit, USA, Suzy Lake emigrated to Canada in 1968. It was in a political climate that followed the violent racial riots of 1967 in Detroit - also known as the 12th Street riot - the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and in the very particular context of the Vietnam War, which led many American citizens to flee the United States to escape general army mobilisation, that Suzy Lake left her native country. From 1970 onwards, she took part in the Montreal art scene, notably as co-founder of the Artist Run Space Véhicule Art Inc. with guest artists such as Sol Lewitt, Alison Knowles, Les Levine, General Idea, Roberto Longo and Bill Viola. Concurrently, she produced works, whose influence and politicization were to be decisive for many artists such as Cindy Sherman.
Initially, performance was used to avoid tropes of Lake’s traditional training wherein she learned to recontextualize the use of formal and perceptual elements as strategies to orchestrate her conceptual concepts. Her work begins with questions regarding representation and perception of the self as a free and responsible being, through photographic sequences and films. The photographic medium is effectively used for its documentary but also critical capacity, confronted with the popular, advertising and commercial imagery then in full rise in North American society. These impositions of consumerism and youth culture prompted Lake’s work of the 90s to engage in addressing the body through ageism and a different beauty.

Submitted by michèle didier