Jason Lazarus: Live Archive

Jason Lazarus: Live Archive includes seventeen original art works—a combination of process-based installations and static objects, including a site-specific installation of Lazarus’ ongoing archive of over 3,000 donated photographs deemed “too hard to keep”; an installation of re-created signs from the Occupy Movement; a piece featuring a student of classical piano learning to play Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1, live in the gallery; and several recent photographs and mixed media pieces.

For Untitled (2013), which was conceived as a “parable of learning,” Lazarus has invited Paul Dab, a graduate student of classical piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to learn Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 within The Museum. Over the course of the exhibition, the student will fill the gallery with the sounds of learning, including mistakes, triumphs, and, inevitably, the student’s own stylistic interpretation of the piece. Inspired by his own experiences as an artist-educator, Lazarus puts the process of learning and the accumulation of knowledge on display rather than concealing it, with the hope of creating a contemplative space for viewers to reflect on their own relationship to learning and creativity.

Phase I/Live Archive is a growing collection of re-created protest signs from the Occupy Movement, the international protest movement against social and economic inequality that began on September 17, 2011, in New York’s Zuccotti Park. By October 9, 2011, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in more than ninety-five cities across eighty-two countries. These unprecedented events and their extensive media exposure throughout the world proved ripe for artistic investigation and perfectly suited to Lazarus, whose interests in various types of image production, the archive, and the artistic genre of social practice become entwined in the work’s ongoing development.

The signs displayed in Phase I/Live Archive were re-created from media-sourced images in workshops facilitated by the artist. During these workshops, participants translated the image of a sign into a literal, three-dimensional copy, using the same or similar materials to duplicate its text as well as any creases, bends, and tears.

The different strategies employed by Lazarus to create these, and several other recent works using photography-centric media on display, simultaneously assert, disrupt, and question how photographs can provide alternate ways to consider the use, value, and meaning of images in an image-laden culture.

Tucked away in a dusty album or on your digital camera, is there a photograph that you don’t want to look at, but can’t bear to get rid of? This experience is the basis for Too Hard To Keep (2010–present), an ongoing archive of images whose owners have opted to put them in the care of someone else. Lazarus collects photographs that people cannot bear to keep, but also do not want to destroy and displays them in site-specific installations. Submissions have included photos of friends, family, pets, places, objects, and more.

As of early 2013, the lifelong archival project has garnered more than 3,000 images. Lazarus does not ask why the photograph is painful to keep, and exhibits them anonymously alongside other entries, in no particular order. Some images, marked private by the donor, are exhibited with their face to the wall. The intimate installation of excerpts from the archive is accompanied by an invitation from the artist to contribute to the collection.

“I am interested in the role of the contemporary artist as hell-raiser, prophet, failure, and historian.”
— Jason Lazarus

Rising star and Jewish artist, Jason Lazarus has his first West Coast museum exhibition. Chicago-based artist is known for using both traditional photography and found or solicited images and texts to create installations that explore private and public realms of experience, and the ways they often overlap. Equal parts art maker, collector, archivist, and organizer, Lazarus actively engages the public in the creation and consideration of his work. Lazarus’ work simultaneously directs attention inward toward the personal and outward toward the historical.

Jason Lazarus: Live Archive is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is sponsored by BMO Harris Bank. Supporting sponsorship of The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s presentation of Jason Lazarus: Live Archive is provided by Rayko Photo Center.