Lyle Ashton Harris uses photography to inspire thoughts of racism, sexism, sexual identity, anti-Semitism and cosmopolitanism.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Harris's exhibition, entitled Blow Up, opened on September 4 and will run through October 18 at the UB Anderson Gallery. It is currently Harris's only east coast exhibition.
Blow Up is also the title of a book written by Harris that examines 20 years of work, including reproductions of works created throughout his career in addition to several significant new texts about the artist.
Harris can be described as one of today's most important and groundbreaking artists. Born in the Bronx and still residing in New York City, Harris spends a third of the year living in Ghana, located on the west coast of Africa.
The very friendly and charismatic Harris teaches at the prestigious New York University and is also a photojournalist for the New York Times.
According to the University at Buffalo's Art Galleries, it was Harris's theatrical black-and-white self-portraits that first gained critical attention. Using the body as a socio-psychological metaphor, Harris examined both racial and gender identity through these works.
In 2002, Anna Deavere Smith, a Tony award and Pulitzer Prize-nominated African-American actress, playwright and professor, wrote, "Lyle's work questions the meaning of maleness and femaleness, not to mention of blackness and whiteness... is it possible that, now, we can look at identity as a constellation: that each of us has inside of ourselves many fragments?"
Inspiring questions such as these is a main goal of Harris's when creating his works.
On Monday, Sept. 15, the Center for the Arts screening room was packed with students, mostly art majors, eager to listen to a lecture presented by Harris.
The lecture began with video footage of Harris's first visual arts performance, which he conducted in 2006 at Yale University. Specifically, his performance focused on issues regarding racial, gender and sexual differences.
Pictures of Michael Jackson were projected on a screen behind Harris while an audience member read an excerpt from an article about sexual abuse within the U.S. prison system.
The video, while interesting, seemed to be a bit amateur for someone with his knowledge and expertise. The visuals themselves were shaky and Harris was all over the place, jumping from a desk to the floor and climbing over and through the audience.
On the other hand, the story that Harris had the audience member read was quite compelling.
Harris continued by showing clips of photographs he had taken while in Africa. One photo, consisting of men on a boat in Ghana, was produced on a backdrop made of flower socks, fabric originally used by the men in the photograph for shade from the sun.
The large-scale collages that Harris features in Blow Up consist of four different versions of the same piece that all attempt to combine ideals and concerns into one work. It is a form of collage that constructs meaning about history. The final version contains a center image that was found on the original version, only now it is four times the size.
The image is a copy of an Adidas ad that portrays a famous European soccer player receiving a foot massage from an unknown black man.
During the question and answer portion of the lecture, someone in the audience asked Harris what the meaning behind his works was. Harris's explanation was that his works must generate a response. He wants to engage his audiences intellectually by confronting viewers with arrangements of colliding images that are both seductive and beautiful.
Harris concluded his lecture by encouraging the youth to be the bridge to other possibilities not available today. He warned of a media that puts a wall up for younger generations, and advised reading alternative newspapers not produced by the U.S. mass media.
Images provide a forum to challenge global circulation because they are left in our minds.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
