November 10 to December 17, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present Toute Pens\u00e9e \u00e9met un Coup de D\u00e9s<\/em>, a solo exhibition of recent works by Lucas Blalock. The exhibition constitutes the artist\u2019s first gallery exhibition in Canada.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Borrowing its title from the final line in a poem by French poet St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, Toute Pens\u00e9e \u00e9met un Coup de D\u00e9s <\/em>comprises two elements: oversized photographs in the Bunker space and smaller works in the gallery\u2019s back room. In the former, Blalock\u2019s UV-printed pictures are stretched over wooden frames and lean against the wall, towering over the viewer, acting more like large-scale sculptures than traditional photographs. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This installation continues Blalock\u2019s ten-year preoccupation with reimagining photography through bodily encounters. In previous investigations, Blalock has incorporated tangible, fleshy subjects into his scenes, photographing hot dogs, ground beef, bodily bits, and stuffed animals. The corporeal is further emphasized in the artist\u2019s techniques; using digital tools as if they were finger paints, working in the interpenetrating space of augmented reality, and through sculptural intervention. Blalock\u2019s ongoing interest lies in rewiring our contemporary relationship to images by exploring the sensory potentials of an otherwise ephemeral, screen-based medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition\u2019s towering artworks and surreal subjects recall theatre sets or misbegotten billboards. But here, the scenes are allusions, showing a sort of slippery, winking relationship between the object and the abstracted role it plays within its image. The artworks\u2019 subjects\u2014a folded piece of paper, a shower extension, zippers\u2014are at once mundane and peculiar, but have become undeniably monumental. Inthe chance encounter illustrated by the meeting of the sewing machine and umbrella on an ironing board <\/em>(2010-22), whose title references Surrealist poet Comte de Lautr\u00e9amont describing the beauty of incompatible realities, a twisted dryer exhaust kit recalls an embracing Virgin and Child, complete with industrial halos. Both Fork in Motion<\/em> (2015-22), showing a stack of forks against a fleshy pink foam, and Athletic Portrait<\/em> (2018-22), featuring a concave piece of metal, not unlike a hip or shoulder joint, atop a red carpet, call to mind more elegant Modernist conceits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In both bodies of work, Blalock thrives in the tensions of allusion, cribbing devices from Surrealism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism. Yet he is playing the past for the future and pushing forward relationships intractably bound up in our\u2014and photography\u2019s\u2014present situation. The object world is ours, caught up in disposability, commodified desire, and plastics, but even so, there is a sense that these compositions and characters are turned inward, operating according to their own set of terms, with or without us. They have been resigned to their dearth of value but, as Mallarm\u00e9 says in his own potential rejoinder to Blalock\u2019s title: \u201cA Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n