Lucas Blalock
"MAKING MEMERIES"

Exhibition: 5 April – 14 May, 2017
Opening reception: Wednesday, 5 April, 6:30pm

Espace Images Vevey presents this exhibition at la Ferblanterie, Chaussée de la Guinguette, behind Vevey train station.

This project explores in an interactive way the shifting boundaries between ultra-connected contemporary lives and the role that photography plays in them. Before the Internet, taking a picture was an act of memory, seeking to preserve the past in still images. In the digital age, the act speaks for itself and tends to empty the process of its historic meaning. This is made obvious in the way smartphones are used, creating massive archives of images that, for the most part, will never be seen. Nowadays, photography has changed its relationship with time: anchored in the past in the 19th and 20th century, it is now an experience that is almost completely restricted to the instant the shot is taken. Consequently, human beings live in a culture of an everlasting present, a world driven by memes, in which thousands of images are shared effortlessly and disappear just as quickly into digital oblivion.

How is contemporary photography produced and what is its place in this context? How will it adapt to this new relationship with time? These are the questions that Making Memeries aims to answer. The title of the series plays on the words "memories" and "meme", a neologism of the digital age that describes images relayed and diverted, often with humour, that spread across the web. The installation consists in eight large format prints that can be "activated" by viewers thanks to a mobile app.

By resorting to augmented reality in an artistic way, Blalock pushes the boundaries of photography and includes sound, a 3D finish and animations to the experience. The public is thereby invited to reimagine this medium and the various possible forms it might take in the future.

"Making Memeries" is Lucas Blalock’s latest art book, published to mark the installation commissioned by Self Publish Be Happy, which was presented successively at the Tate Modern in London, C/O in Berlin and UNSEEN in Amsterdam before Espace Images Vevey.

Developed by Studio Reify, the Making Memeries app, available for free on the iTunes store and Google Play, enables the exhibition’s viewers and the book’s readers to interact with the photos.

Born in Asheville, USA, in 1978, Lucas Blalock graduated in 2013 with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, after following a course in photography in New York. He now works and lives in Brooklyn. His work has recently been exhibited at the MoMA and the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Dallas Museum of Art.