Lynn Cazabon
With the mad rush of the digital age, the analog photo alchemists were abruptly usurped by hoards of rank digi-amateurs, deftly tapping in their wired up bedrooms. The old guard at a literal chemicals loss is just now being forced to immigrate to the new world, .
Lynn Cazabon straddles these analog/digital generations. She started in one but was not so wedded to it because her gang while trained technically in the old school alchemy was far more astute to the irony concept driven cultural analysis with its emphasis on race, environmental, gender and identity politics.
Somewhat skittish and obtuse Cazabon's visual work has always sought to define her topic by what it might be and very much by what it is not. Thus documenting a flood sparked by images of the horrors of the aftermath of Katrina isn't really documenting this flood, nor even the clearly re-staged flood but instead a deluge of another deeper far more existential sort.
Time, probably the unforgiving subject of EVERYTHING, silicon or carbon, is now hepped by SPEED incarnate. The internet rushes faster than our own synapse response considerations. The tools of communion about to explode in our Iphone nattering faces is reflective but not meditative.
Cazabon's recent photography looks backward with controlled nostalgia (use of photo paper, darkroom, sabbatical time), sideways with the nod to academia and her station in life, and hurls forward towards the apocalyptic. Us. Our extended selves, digitally scanned broken down hung up in cast off cell phones, fingerprints melded to keyboards and enter-twined with all the other gutted de_VICES...
all swimming in foul electro-impregnated vomit dreck. Switching between glorious color bursts and mud lumpiness Cazabon's wry images keep to her overall mission of bearing witness to a culture immersed in self-centered seek, adore, sell and destroy.
Jack Livingston
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