Impression à base de fibres d’argent sur gélatine tonifiée au sélénium, plâtre, 1998
As I entered later middle age, my work moved away from a sociopolitical trajectory to a quieter sense of empowerment. Yet, a tension persists in this series through the palimpsest of the figure’s past. These works initiate a celebration of experience, maturity, and resilience—as a different beauty. The figure is dressed in a thin cotton slip that signifies both vulnerability and metaphoric armour. Her determination re-directs “the struggle” to a rebuilding process. The plaster and photographic descriptions of rubble and detritus distil to a painterly surface. The emotional and physical labour transposes the sweeping narrative toward a meditative rhythm of the gesture.
Suzy Lake immigrated to Montréal in 1968. She is known for her largescale photographs dealing with the body as both subject and device. She has adopted performance, video, and photography to explore the poli- tics of the body, identity, and power relations. In her later work she expands these issues of resistance to include the ageing body.
The Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective of her work in 2014. Lake was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2016, and of the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024. Her work is in major Canadian museums and international institutions such as the Brandhorst Museum (Munich), the Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum Lodz (Wroclaw), and the Sammlung Verbund (Vienna).