Steve Lyons: Loch Ness

Exhibition

January 8 – February 13, 2010
Opening on Saturday January 16, 3pm-5pm
Artist’s Talk on Wednesday January 20 at 5:30pm

Project Description

Skol’s winter programming begins with a solo exhibition by Montréal-based artist Steve Lyons. This evolving and ephemeral installation explores aspects of image construction while exposing its pitfalls. By way of a three-dimensional translation of an archival photo of Loch Ness monster hunters, Lyons invests in the mimetic, performative, and pseudo-scientific recreation of the controversy. Using found materials and documentary footage, he shakes up our trust in the visual. This exhibition is presented in a text by Bernard Schütze.

« Between the unstable, flimsy installation components—born of a time-based process—and the solid image appearing continuously on the monitor, the viewer is confronted with two competing realities: one of a non-resembling, non-illusionistic assemblage that s/he observes directly as an eyewitness from various vantage points; and the other of an electronically mediated mimetic and solidified (albeit live) image that reveals something hidden in full view.»

Keys

1. Source photograph for Loch Ness: Photographer unknown. From Roy P. Mackal, The Monsters of Loch Ness, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1976.

2. Dick Raynor,  Loch Ness Investigation: New Research and Analysis.

3. David Green and Joanna Lowry, “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality”, in Where is the Photograph?, edited by David Green, Photoforum and Photoworks, Brighton, UK, 2003, p.47-60.