photo : courtesy of Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto
For its contribution to this year’s CONTACT Photography Festival, the University of Toronto Art Centre took on the challenge of surveying the past forty years of Suzy Lake’s prolific output in both film and photography. Taking stock of an “underappreciated” aspect of Lake’s practice — her use of formal aesthetics to communicate political content — Political Poetics focuses on the relationship between figure and ground in the celebrated performance artist’s work.
A concept put forth by cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan to explain the relationship between a medium (the figure) and its social context (the ground), the figure-ground model also served as the theme for this year’s city-wide festival. In Lake’s exhibition, curated by Matt Brower and Carla Garnet, the concept is mapped (sometimes unsuccessfully) onto the connection between image and identity in the artist’s practice.
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