Each issue of A.i.A. comes with a limited-edition artist’s print, and this Winter, we invited the experimental photographer Lucas Blalock to make a special collectible work. Blalock features in an essay by Charlotte Cotton for our Winter 2023 Collaborations issue. Cotton examines how artists’ collaborations with fashion brands have evolved over the decades, highlighting a special campaign Blalock made for Miu Miu’s Fall/Winter 2022 collection. The artist surprised us with an interactive foldable edition; below, he tells A.i.A. about the piece. Grab your own edition on newsstands now, or subscribe for future prints.
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The collectible print that I created for this issue is two photographs that I interlaced in the computer, so that they make a tabula scalata. You’re meant to fold the print, accordion-style. When you angle it in one direction, you get one image. When you turn it, you get another. The print is meant to be activated—that activity is latent in the object—but you can still see both images in the print without folding it. I like that there’s this potential energy.
For a long time, I’ve been folding images together in different ways, usually with techniques like double exposure or using postproduction tools on the computer. Over the last two years, I’ve been interested in pulling these techniques from the computer out into more analog realities.
The images are of a plastic pig nose and a clown onesie. I like this question: a pig or a clown? It’s as if there’s an unseen character who is choosing between these two roles.
For me, the camera is basically a tool for relating to objects. I’m relating to the world using the somewhat narrow vocabulary of photography, which I’m always trying to stretch in different ways. Usually, the objects in my studio are things that don’t hold a lot of status or value on their own, and that’s intentional: I’m elevating and activating the energy within those objects. When I’m making images for brands, bags and shoes are coming in with a high degree of value already. So in some ways, it’s a mirror of what I normally do. I’m playing the fancy objects into my game.