Loop-loop (Picture for NM), 2009

Bringing together twenty-two images created between 2009 and 2010, Lucas Blalock’s second book Towards a Warm Math merges the technical finesse of commercial photography with a penchant for experimentation. Despite seldom instances of the human figure, the hand of the artist is ever-present in Blalock’s spirited, though often disruptive works. Deliberately staged and often staggeringly manipulated, the newest release from David Schoerner’s Hassla Books stresses the limits of the photographic image.

With no discernible interest in narrative, Blalock trains his camera on the banal: an extension cord, individually wrapped bars of soap, a cheese grater. Such objects don’t command the spotlight so much as reluctantly accept it. As veritable stand-ins, Blalock’s physical subjects perform dutifully yet never upstage the main attraction; Towards a Warm Math is emphatically not about what we see, but how.

Untitled (Crystalline Screw), 2009

Strange Loop, 2009

At times recalling the curious formalism of Paul Outerbridge, Blalock complicates pictorial space through overt, yet tactful manipulation. While the aptly named Strange Loop, a deceptively casual collage, showcases the artist at his most anarchic, even the carefully rendered Untitled (Crystalline Screw), resists quick resolution; a delicate spread of mirrors set atop a yellow gingham pattern, Crystalline Screw is at once familiar and foreign.

Loose Triptych returns continually to the same subject, with both camera and model shifting slightly but assuredly against a creased backdrop. A Brechtian touchstone, Loose Triptych exposes the creative process with humility. With little academic posturing, Towards a Warm Math scrutinizes the fidelity of the image, asking not only for a renegotiation of one’s relationship with images, but the world at large.

Towards a Warm Math
Lucas Blalock
8 x 10 in., saddle-stitched, 32 pages, self cover, color offset
Essay by John Houck
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9825471-7-5
Publication date: April 2011

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