Artist-in-Residence Lecture: Dana Lok

Dana Lok, the fall 2018 artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee School of Art, will deliver a lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 25, in the McCarty Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.  

Lok was born in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, in 1988. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Lok has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was a resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio program. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon in 2011. Solo exhibitions include Chewday’s in London, and Clima in Milan. Lok has been in numerous group shows including Dana Lok, Laure Prouvost, Mia Goyette at Bianca D’Alessandro in Copenhagen, In Place Of at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Floating Point at Judith Charles Gallery, and The Crack-Up at Room East, all in New York City.

 “Dana Lok’s paintings make an analogy between a painting and a theater set — both are visual constructions meant for viewing from a particular perspective at a particular time,” said Scott Roben, writer for Art in America. “These paintings provide a peek at the stage from the side, or a view of the stage before the production has started. Through this theatrical analogy, the paintings present language, representation, and knowledge as miraculous, performative activities that require the framework of a stage, not unlike tricks in a magic show.”

“Lok’s skillful use of perspectival shifts – from three dimensions to two dimensions and back – offers us the chance to see the painted surface for what it is: an artificial construction that can stage a multitude of realities; a kind of theatre set,” says Aaron Bogart in a review for Frieze. “Lok’s paintings remind us that the nature of painterly representation, of looking for depth in flatness and of finding flatness in depth, requires ambiguity and perhaps a little bit of paradox.”

The Artist-in-Residence Program was initiated in 1982. Each semester an invited resident artist teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses in the painting and drawing curriculum. The program has been highly successful in making a direct connection to the marketplace of ideas that surrounds art centers such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The artists we bring to campus represent a spectrum of current sensibilities in painting and drawing holding sway in the art world today.

The AIR is integral to the core of the graduate student and undergraduate student experience, and adds significantly to the vitality and vibrancy of the dialectic engaged by the various faculty and students of the School of Art.

The lecture is at 109 Art + Architecture Building, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard, Knoxville.