Deana Lawson
New York, 1071 5th Avenue
Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY) creates images that are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent. Her photographs and films result from collaborations with strangers whom the artist encounters by chance or deliberately seeks out. These individuals are often depicted within richly textured domestic settings in which the details of décor, lighting, and pose are precisely choreographed. In this way, Lawson draws on the legacies of historical portraiture, documentary photography, and the family album, but transcends these traditions, constructing scenes that merge lived experience with imagined narratives.
Deana Lawson, Young Grandmother, 2019 © Deana Lawson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
The aesthetics and intergenerational connectivity of the Black diaspora guide Lawson’s choice of subject matter. Each of her works takes its place in an overarching project, cohering into what she terms “an ever-expanding mythological extended family.” Close examination of her compositions reveals the presence of portals, adornments, and devotional objects that evoke the proximity of an unseen realm. This sense of the celestial is heightened by images of sublime natural phenomena such as galaxies and waterfalls, and in instances where the radiance of an individual seems to burn through the surface of the work itself. Lawson’s works also demonstrate a special attention to the element of light, as both key to the process by which photographs are produced, and a manifestation of the divinity that suffuses her sitters. Recently, Lawson has begun to set her works in mirrored frames that reflect light outward and materialize an exchange between her subjects and the viewer; in her words, they function as “a reflective lining between worlds, that which is ‘seen’ in the photograph, and that which ‘sees.’”
Deana Lawson, Chief, 2019. Pigment print. © Deana Lawson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
In this exhibition, large-scale photographs, some of which are embedded with holograms, are arrayed in a dense constellation that surrounds a spectral rendering of a torus—a three-dimensional shape formed by a circle rotated around a central axis. As such, the installation draws on the thermodynamic concept of centropy, a term that describes how the electrification of matter leads to regeneration and harmonious order. The same impulse of renewal through creative energy is central to Lawson’s vision, in which her subjects are figured as ineffably splendid, occupying a world that they command absolutely.
