Hidden Tracks. Angles Gallery, 2013
For his first professional exhibition, Lifson has developed a body of work in painting, sculpture and installation that investigates the human need for magic, an exploration of how people receive information through the frame of pictures and objects. The work is situated within an allegory of escape, using images and objects that suggest meditation. Both images and objects border the banal and the phantasmagorical, treading the boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Strategic use of a production methodology of repetition enables the artist to produce alternate narratives that enable the viewer to perceive different, sometimes contradictory information from the "same" picture.
Repetition, in this instance, becomes an archetype of narrative production. Each of the works involves immediacy as well as invisibility, positioned so as to complicate representation itself. Establishing a constant flux of language and sign, the artist uses this representational strategy to mimic the function of abstraction in visual art. This assertion recognizes paintings and objects as historical documents, recording a history of fiction, mimicking the skewed trails of a history of a painting's or object's origins that are based on the very interventions by media production. The work is positioned on a historical trajectory that is defined, by itself, as a fiction - of what images and objects are informed by, far beyond what they represent.
The suite of Tent paintings resides between tranquility and anxiety, a psychological space of meditation. Subtle shifts in light reference the film still, our contemporary media culture for storytelling. The image suggests alien abduction, the searching light of a police helicopter, a gravesite. Alternate narratives are suggested through reproduction, repeated marks producing meaning through interpretation, linking the representational works to abstraction. Sculptural works use the strategy of reproduction as an allusion to the retelling of stories. These alternative narratives break away from their origins, offering an allegory of escape.
