In Lisa Tan's video My Pictures of You (2017–19), the artist thinks of images of Mars as a death mask of Earth, captured millions of years in the future, yet witnessed in the present. Compelled by photographs from NASA’s expeditions depicting Mars’ topography, Tan senses how the planet’s dry lake beds, undulating sand dunes, and horizon could be our own. Their striking familiarity transports her to the desert terrain of the American Southwest where she was raised. She bounces her poetic speculation off of a scientist responsible for key instruments gauging water and atmosphere on Mars.

A road trip through the desert frames questions around climate and extinction. Yet the deeper concern is with unraveling photographic meaning in relation to the Mars images, through the artist’s alternative analysis of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Barthes’ seminal text on photography pivots around an image of the author’s deceased, beloved mother as a child in what is known as the Winter Garden photograph.

My Pictures of You offers a thought-experiment: replace Barthes’ mother for “mother” Earth. Despite the video’s bleak terrain, it manages to transform its own pessimism into a joyful affirmation of earthbound existence.

Lisa Tan is currently showing a new commission, Dodge and Burn (2017 – 2020 July 4) at The Athenaeum from January 14 – April 2.

Born in 1973 in Syracuse, NY, USA, Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm where she is Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness, serve as drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that different representations play in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. Her work has recently appeared in exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With), Rotterdam; Tabakalera Center for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the MIT List Center, Cambridge; Kunsthall Trondheim; the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Lisa Tan is represented by Galleri Riis (Oslo). For more, see lisatan.net

Gallery
Margie E. West Gallery
Exhibition Duration
January 28, 2022 - February 24, 2022