Lucas Ajemian
Born: 1975
Lives in New York
The delicate crossings, borderlines and combinations of individual
and collective authorship are the material of Lucas Ajemian’s work. His
performances, film installations, drawings and sculptures are based on
the integration, revision and de-articulation of found sources. Ajemian
works with dysfunctions, conflicts, false starts and voids as an ironic
and humorous critique of political and social behavior.
Ajemian often works with several media within one piece in order to
engage with the gaps, differences, and points of contact between them.
He takes an object and duplicates it in another form. In 6 Minute Area Map and Big Postcard, he constructed sculptures out of stills from previously filmed videos, while in The Quiet American he drew stills from an appropriated music video. A more recent work, From Beyond,
relies on even more elaborate forms of overlapping and displacement. In
collaboration with his brother, Jason, they transcribed the Black
Sabbath song Into the Void backwards, and performed the
reversed score with an orchestra. The performance was documented on
video, a 10-inch vinyl record was made, and the score was presented on
a wall. In the exhibition, the audience was offered several ways to
look at the same musical work: as a score, as a recording, as a filmed
performance, and in reverse. The video was played forward, and then
replayed backwards, thus repeating and mirroring their initial act and
reconstitutiong the Black Sabbath song anew.
These exchanges, rather than taking place along familiar axes, as in
works that work between film and photography for example, navigate
instead between seemingly unrelated media, and in doing so, open up
unexpected possibilities and perspectives onto them both for the artist
and the viewer. To the extent that these works are critical and
self-reflexive, they reflect onto questions of a far more tenuous,
elusive, and unfamiliar nature, questions that lie outside of familiar
intermedia or cross-disciplinary tropes.
See also Lucas Ajemian's solo show from 2004
and from 2006
