Lucas Blalock's 99¢ Store Still Lifes | "New York Close Up" | Art21

How does an artist make working at home interesting? In this film, artist Lucas Blalock photographs mundane objects from local discount stores in the living room of his Williamsburg apartment & studio. Shooting with a large format camera, Blalock arranges a series of sculptural, tabletop still lifes on colorful backdrops and patterned fabric. Quickly moving from one setup to the next, Blalock manipulates each scene by employing mirrors, adjusting the camera's vantage point, and repeating objects. Finding time to work on nights and weekends in between his day job, Blalock discusses how the conditions and context of his environment structure his relationship to making images. Featuring the works "Untitled (Crystalline Screw)" (2009), "Untitled (Deck Prism?)" (2009), "Strange Loop" (2009), "Loop-Loop (Picture for NM)" (2009), "All Aspects Simultaneously" (2009), "The Cow (La Vache)" (2011), and "Bananas" (2011), as well as works in progress.

Lucas Blalock (b. 1978, Asheville, North Carolina, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

CREDITS | "New York Close Up" Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Cinematography: Rafael Moreno Salazar, Andrew David Watson & Ava Wiland. Key Grip: John Marton. Sound: Nicholas Lindner, Wesley Miller & Ava Wiland. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Production Assistant: Paulina V. Ahlstrom, Don Edler & Maren Miller. Design: Open. Artwork: Lucas Blalock. Thanks: Nina Mamakunian. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2011. All rights reserved.

"New York Close Up" is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support provided by The 1896 Studios & Stages.

For more info: http://www.art21.org/newyorkcloseup

[SUBWAY TRAIN PASSING]

[New York Close Up]

[Williamsburg--Brooklyn]

[Lucas Blalock's Home & Studio]

["Lucas Blalock's 99¢ Store Still Lifes"]

I feel like everything may have been photographed.

You know and if it has been...

Lucas Blalock--Artist

it’s not to say that...that those photographs are good at looking at the world.

Just because it’s been sort of catalogued or processed through that machine once or a hundred times or whatever...

That really, the trick with the photograph is to...to get it to act up and to do more than that.

I’m going to make two of these.

I’m going to shoot it one time with the banana still, hopefully....

And then one time with the longer exposure with the bananas moving, so...I don’t know.

We’ll see what happens.

[Living Room]

[Living Room. 250 Sq. Ft.].

I work mostly in my living room so it becomes about how to make that interesting for me to look at.

For the most part, and so you know I use backdrops and I use sort of...all sorts of materials to sort of help bring these things into life and get you to really look at the object.

I think objects that are sort of...that have something pathetic about them are really attractive to me.

Do you normally work this fast?

Yes, I always work really fast.

I’ll go to dollar stores and places like that or sometimes I you know pick up a hubcap off the street and will sort of bring them into the studio and they’ll stay in the studio for a while.

Oftentimes I don’t really know exactly what I’m going to do with them.

And when I’m working, I just sort of go to work and sort of start to develop a problem and...

Sometimes an object will really give me a sort of simple problem to deal with and other times it’s much more a kind of flirtation with the objects in the studio that something sort of gets pulled out of it.

Those are those Styrofoam forms I was talking about earlier.

I feel sometimes like the objects I use are sort of stand-ins for other objects, you know?

They’re like objects that...that are sort of performing the role of the object in front of the camera, although they’re not the sort of traditional object in front of the camera.

[Studio Setup]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table. Backdrop paper.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table. Backdrop Paper. 1000 Watt Kino Flo.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table. Backdrop Paper. 1000 Watt Kino Flo. 500 Watt Lowell Omni.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table. Backdrop Paper. 1000 Watt Kino Flo. 500 Watt Lowell Omni. Tripod.]

[Studio Setup. Backdrop Stand. Folding Table. Backdrop Paper. 1000 Watt Kino Flo. 500 Watt Lowell Omni. Tripod. Deardorff Camera.]

You know I...I work full time so...so I usually shoot at night. I like to shoot with a 4x5 camera.

Which you know has to be on a tripod so it has these sort of rules built into it.

You know maybe that’s really where the choices start is that you know these are the sort of conditions of the situation and then from there I can you know buy objects and sort of bring them home and deal with these things.

This is ridiculous.

I’ll sort of mess around and keep moving and keep moving things and when they click in, it’s really much more about me seeing it than it is about me constructing it.

The foam isn’t working. Uh, I think the...

I think maybe I was a little too invested in it as a material to begin with? Uh…

It...I can’t say exactly why. Uh…

I mean there’s got to be something to do with it.

But I don’t know, sometimes things just have to sit around my studio for a long time before I sort of figure out what to do with them and this may just be one of those things.

I’ll make you know 20, 25 pictures a week and maybe one or two of them really work.

A picture that’s successful for me is to have it not fall into a category.

For me the most sort of satisfying or interesting thing about making a new picture is...is a picture that you really have to look at to sort of come to terms with.

That it...there’s no way to sort of stand away from it and just know what it is.

This stuff is never going to come up.