Suzy Lake


Suzy Lake is an American-Canadian artist based in Toronto, Canada, who is known for her work as a photographer, performance artist and video producer. Using a range of media, Lake explores topics including identity, beauty, gender and aging.

Life

Lake was born June 24, 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. She began her fine art studies at Wayne State University and Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan from 1965 to 1968. During this period, she became involved with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. She also witnessed the Detroit Race Riots of 1967. Soon after, in 1968 Lake immigrated to Canada with her husband to escape the Vietnam War draft.
Lake completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University in 1980.

Artistic impact

Using costumes, make-up and props, Lake creates photo-based self-portraits, often by assuming new identities. Her adopted personas highlight the possibilities for deception involved in posing for the camera. An example is "Suzy Lake As Patty Hearst", a project Lake made in collaboration with Bill Jones, featuring the artist as the eponymous Hearst.
Suzy Lake has twenty-five portfolios of her artwork. Each deals with politics of gender, identity and beauty. She creates art to express how what she does relates to what she is or to what people think she is. She uses her photographs, videos, and performances to draw attention to social norms and constraints.
Lake explained in an interview that she always uses herself in her art because this is how she develops understanding of social restrictions for women.
Lake uses art to control her own representation. Her earlier On Stage photos were influenced by Detroit. In these, Lake photographed herself as a wife and mother but later she wanted to make work to reverse that. In Montréal, Lake observed a marked power difference between genders, and she stated that women have a "glass ceiling" that led to her Choreographed Puppet photos. More recently, Lake introduced a new vision of beauty by displaying her older body in her portfolio entitled "Beauty and the Aging Body."

Early work

Lake lived in Montréal for about ten years. She taught at the Montreal Museum School and was mentored by the Minimalist artist, Guido Molinari. She was active in the early conceptualist art scene there. In 1971, Lake became a co-founder of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art Inc. Lake's work during this period was influenced by photo-based artists who were using the camera to represent an idea rather than documenting reality. This was also a period when Lake began concentrate on the subject of identity. In her 1973 series of photographs entitled A One Hour Conversation with Allan B., she is the subject as the camera records her expression at various intervals of a candid conversation with a friend. To emphasize her expressions, Lake used white face make-up. She then invited her friends and family to circle which of the photographs most represented her personality.
In an interview in Magenta magazine, Lake noted the influence of the political climate of the 1970s on her work. She stated: "I know that I am a feminist, but I can see that my politics originated in human rights issues, civil rights, the FLQ in Quebec and race issues in the States." In 2006, Roberta Smith of the New York Times compared her work to that of Cindy Sherman; however, Thomas Micchelli, reviewing the feminist collection of the Vienna-based Verbund AG for Hyperallergic.com asserts that Lake was an influence on the latter in school. The two artists were contemporaries in the 1970s and in 1975 Sherman invited Lake to exhibit in a Hallwalls show in New York. Lake continues to make work about the female body, now focusing on ageing. She exhibits her work worldwide.

Major exhibitions

Lake was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective exhibition, Introducing Suzy Lake, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014–15 curated by Georgiana Uhlyarik. In 2016, she received the Scotiabank Photography Award. This resulted in another survey exhibition curated by Gaëlle Morel at the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto, as part of the 2017 Contact Photography Festival.

Honours

Suzy Lake is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2016, she was recipient of Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. and the Scotiabank Photography Award.

Gallery representation

She has been represented by Galerie Gilles Gheerbrant ; Jared Sable Gallery, and Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Lake is currently represented by Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto ; Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles ; Galerie Donald Browne, Montréal.

Catalogues