Nathan Lyons, Untitled (Tucson)
by :
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Nathan Lyons, Untitled (Tucson) (2013). Photo: Nathan Lyons/Courtesy George Eastman Museum
Nathan Lyons’s photograph Untitled (Tucson) (2013), part of Nathan Lyons: In Pursuit of Magic at the George Eastman Museum, depicts a metal doorway adorned with paintings of an angel’s wings and a devil’s horns and tail. On the far left side, the street address, “272,” is painted in sinuous black. Beiges and pale blues predominate, accented by bits of crimson and orange. The light is flat, the time of day hard to figure. In the immediate foreground sits a construction barricade topped by a reflecting disc, its shape suggesting a cherubic Christmas ornament, further resolving the imagery of the angel’s wings. On the top of the doorway, the bottom half of a dark, painted sphere looms ominously into the frame. A red crayon lies on the ground, as if just used by a recently departed interloper deeply interested in cosmogony–a stand-in for Lyons himself perhaps, like Hitchcock’s ever-present doppelgänger.
It is the ability of a photograph to conjure that “as if,” that most basic mode of metaphorical/metaphysical inquiry out of its constituent elements, that makes an image vibrate and hum. Untitled (Tucson) hums, but I still find it lacking. It is exemplary of many of Lyons’s photographs: it is limited to a single viewing plane, and all the vernacular elements appear to be painted by one artist’s hand, but that hand is not Lyons’s. The diegesis of the photograph is little different than the world itself; the sign painter has already laid the plot out bare, a preordained mystery neatly tied up, and the audience does not have to do additional labor. That the viewer has nowhere else to look and is stuck in a visual-conceptual loop between crayon and painting make this photograph feel as if Lyons is telling you what to think, instead of allowing you to discover it for yourself.
Nando Alvarez-Perez is an artist and teacher and the co-founder of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art.
Image - Nathan Lyons, Untitled (Tucson), 2013. Photo: Nathan Lyons/Courtesy George Eastman Museum
Nathan Lyons, In Pursuit of Magic
January 25 – June 9, 2019
George Eastman Museum
900 East Avenue, Rochester NY 14607
eastman.org
