Lyons exhibit reexamines human figure

19th-century torso. A fragment of a Renaissance painting. A photo of relatives lost to the Holocaust. A billboard featuring two young male models. All are part of a new installation at the Memorial Art Gallery that reexamines the human figure as the major focus of Western art.

Representations: A New Work by Joan Lyons consists of 79 black-and-white images of subjects ranging from classical works of art to contemporary mass-media images. All were photographed conventionally, scanned and output as high-resolution inkjet prints, mounted, and recombined on a grid. The result is a work that plays with the ideas of time, representation, and memory.

Joan Lyons, Representations: A New Work (detail). Courtesy the artist.

As an artist, Lyons has exhibited widely in a variety of media, including silver-gelatin prints, artists' books, archaic photographic processes, pinhole photography, offset lithography, photo-quiltmaking, and computer art.

Representations is part of a citywide festival celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Visual Studies Workshop. Lyons is a faculty member at VSW--where she teaches computer imaging, bookmaking, and alternative processes--and is a founding coordinator of the VSW Press. She also has lectured and been a visiting artist at universities across the country; conducted workshops in the United States, France, and Brazil; and served on visual-arts panels for such groups as the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. In addition, she has served as editor of Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, and has collaborated in the design and production of over 400 books.

A graduate of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Lyons also holds an M.F.A. in photographic studies from SUNY at Buffalo.

Representations remains on view in MAG's Lockhart Gallery through Sunday, September 24.

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