BILL JONES & SUZY LAKE: "Suzy Lake as Patty Hearst"
Bill Jones: "If You Knew Suzy (part 2)"
1976-2008
Color and black and white photographs, 24 x 30 inches.
BILL JONES + SUZY LAKE "Suzy Lake as Patty Hearst"
November 21 - December 20, 2008
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
980 Queen St West
Toronto, ON M6J 1H1
gallery hours: wed-sat 11-5pm
http://www.paulpetro.com
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
980 Queen St West
Toronto, ON M6J 1H1
gallery hours: wed-sat 11-5pm
http://www.paulpetro.com
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present works from the 1970s by
Bill Jones and Suzy Lake. This concise two-person exhibition follows Lake's
participation in WACK!, an exhibition of feminist art from 1968-78 currently on view at the
Vancouver Art Gallery, and Lake and Jones' participation in the re-opening this week of
the Art Gallery of Ontario. Both Lake and Jones have major works from the
1970s included in the newly re-opened contemporary spaces.
Here is an informative text by Bill Jones on the occasion of this
exhibition:
Notes on three works from the
1970s
In 1976 I was living in Vancouver and had seen an ad in FILE Magazine in which
Suzy Lake is pictured standing against a massive column wearing a slinky floor-length
dress (a version of the image in the current exhibition). The ad copy challenges
New York artist, writer and entrepreneur Willoughby Sharp to a kind of "art mogul"
contest. Shortly thereafter, I received a studio visit from Bill Ewing, then the director of
Galerie Optica in Montreal. He showed me examples of photo-conceptual work he was
interested in and which defined his gallery's direction, including stills from Suzy's
"A Natural Way to Draw." Later that year, I went to Montreal for my solo show at Optica
and met Suzy for the first time at my opening. Patty Hearst, the American Newspaper
heiress, had been all over the news. The radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army,
had kidnapped her; Hearst had shown up in a bank security camera photo carrying a
machine gun during a robbery. I asked Suzy on the spot if she would play Patty Hearst
in a photo-piece I had in mind. Suzy showed up the next day wearing a red beret and
raincoat and carrying a realistic-looking gun right out of the news photos.
In 1976 I was living in Vancouver and had seen an ad in FILE Magazine in which
Suzy Lake is pictured standing against a massive column wearing a slinky floor-length
dress (a version of the image in the current exhibition). The ad copy challenges
New York artist, writer and entrepreneur Willoughby Sharp to a kind of "art mogul"
contest. Shortly thereafter, I received a studio visit from Bill Ewing, then the director of
Galerie Optica in Montreal. He showed me examples of photo-conceptual work he was
interested in and which defined his gallery's direction, including stills from Suzy's
"A Natural Way to Draw." Later that year, I went to Montreal for my solo show at Optica
and met Suzy for the first time at my opening. Patty Hearst, the American Newspaper
heiress, had been all over the news. The radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army,
had kidnapped her; Hearst had shown up in a bank security camera photo carrying a
machine gun during a robbery. I asked Suzy on the spot if she would play Patty Hearst
in a photo-piece I had in mind. Suzy showed up the next day wearing a red beret and
raincoat and carrying a realistic-looking gun right out of the news photos.
The completed work was shown later
that year (1976) at the Pender Street Gallery in
Vancouver, a newly configured Parallel
Gallery formed by Willard Holmes (former
curator of the VAG) Ian Wallace, myself and
a number of other artists. The exhibition,
titled A Different Kind of Romance,
included the work with Suzy, one featuring
Tom Sherman (then on the board of the
artist-run centre A Space in Toronto), and
a number of collaborative works with the
Vancouver-based media artist Ardele Lister.
Two years later, a second series of
collaborative works with Ardele were shown at
the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris. This
marked the end of our photo-collaborative
works. While in Paris for the show, I
photographed a new solo work with a slightly
more rarified visual narrative style titled
"Les Crimes de l'Amour," after a cheap copy
of the De Sade novel found at a book stall.
The complete eight-part work from which
the triptych in the current exhibition is
taken features Ardele as a "passerby" looking
into a knife store window and again at her
own reflection in a Parisian jewelry shop.
These images, shot with a hand held 4x5"
Speed Graphic, were not only the first of
a new form of poetic visual narrative, but
began my use of a motif borrowed from
Atget's Parisian shop window photographs
at the turn of the century. The entire work
(but for the triptych in the current
exhibition) was subsequently purchased by the Art
Bank and exhibited (the triptych
featuring Ardele included) at PS1 in New York in the
1978 exhibition, The Altered
Photograph. This is only the second time the
"missing
triptych" has been
shown.
The third work in the current
exhibition Suzy Lake as Patty Hearst is a follow-up
series of diptychs titled "The Human
Condition" (1979). It extends the use of black
and white and colour photography as meter
in the visual poetic form, the panoramic
window motif and the juxtaposition of
opacity and transparency (screen grate and
window) begun with "If You Knew Suzy"
and continuing throughout my work of the
70s and 80s.
-- Bill Jones, 2008
