DEANA LAWSON
Hugo Boss Prize Winner at the Guggenheim
The Hugo Boss Prize Exhibition Featuring New and Recent Work by Deana Lawson is on view now at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and runs through October 11, 2021. The show, titled ‘The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy’, includes large-scale photographs and holograms by the 2020 winner of the biennial prize.
Deana Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, NY. Her fascinating work proves that photography can reveal things beyond what the eye can see. Lawson lives and works in New York, and her images reflect Black diasporic identity. The way she carefully calibrates staging, lighting, and poses creates a space “somewhere between the everyday and the intangible, the mundane and the magnificent: a space that emphasizes identity but also agency,” as stated by the museum. Her photographs and films typically collaborate with strangers that she finds or actively seeks out. Although each of the images represents a moment from the tangible world, they reveal “the in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent.” As Lawson states in a short film featured in the exhibition: “The work isn’t necessarily a documentary project about the individual, I’m actually trying to image the mythic realm, or use the person as a vehicle to represent the entity beyond what is actually present.” The photographs go beyond the people portrayed and represent a pause in time. Her enduring themes include the human life cycle from the moment we are born until the time of our death, as well as the regenerative forces of nature. The exhibition’s large-scale photographs and holograms are arranged in a dense constellation that surrounds a spectral rendering of a torus—a three-dimensional shape formed by a circle rotated around a central axis. The process draws on the thermodynamic concept of centropy.
Lawson also highlights the light, as it is critical to producing a photograph, and because it serves as “a manifestation of the divinity that suffuses her sitters.” She also presents her works in mirrored frames which she has describes as representing “a reflective lining between worlds, that which is ‘seen’ in the photograph, and that which ‘sees.'”
The artist won the Hugo Boss Prize in fall 2020. The prize was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievements in contemporary art. Since then, thirteen artists (counting Lawson) have received the award. Lawson was chosen from a list that included other great artists such as Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971, Isfahan, Iran); Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Va.); Elias Sime (b. 1968, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia); Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile); and Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina).
The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, and Ashley James, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art. HUGO BOSS sponsors the Hugo Boss Prize.
