Open Studios 2010, CSULB

ARTISTS

LISA TALBOT

ARTIST STATEMENT
My body of work explores and challenges the practice and traditions of portraiture by renegotiating the ways in which an artist can represent a subject photographically, and in so doing, simultaneously represent the artist’s self. I am interested in creating psychological portraits, free from any direct representation of the subject’s likeness, which capture the interior worlds of the people they are about. There are no people in these photos. My work also provides a visual language to express themes that relate to Carl Jung’s theories of the unconscious, tapping into a childlike freedom of creating art intuitively without restrictions.

I began my series of portraits, which you can view at http://www.lisatalbot.com, toward the end of my studies at Art Center College of Design. Each portrait bears the name of a real person. I take photographs of small-scale landscapes, which I assemble from a variety of objects and materials to create representations of the interior lives of my subjects. These vistas are at once surreal, lo-tech, and punk. They are interpreted as the imagined spaces inhabited by individuals with whom I am engaged in relationships with and capture the ensuing drama that occurs when the lives of family, friends, and lovers collide and converge with my own. These works are as much about me as they are about my subjects. Believing that I cannot be impartial as an artist, I embrace the notion that there are several truths behind any photograph, and communicate deeply personal, emotional, and often contradictory ideas that are open to a spectrum of interpretations to describe not only intrapersonal but also interpersonal dimensions.

The various material references that populate these landscapes -- things such as ChapStick, empty beer cans, pencils, and condoms -- allude to the detritus of human activity, but are re-contextualized and assigned alternative meanings. This method has its roots in traditional environmental portraiture where the subject is paired with various props and environmental cues.

EMAIL: lisa@lisatalbot.com

WEBSITE : http://lisatalbot.com/