Suzy Lake

Beauty at the End of the Season

May 12 - June 9

Beauty at the End of the Season continues Lake's work on female identity with the criteria of beauty, from the position of maturity and endurance, and without irony or narrative. While shooting peonies for an earlier body of work (Peonies and the Lido, 2002), she periodically photographed the roses in her garden. What held Lake's interest was their perseverance to bloom at the end of the season, long after the rest of the garden began hibernation. This characteristic appeared to pose a solution to the problem of how to represent the beauty of the mature female.

The image of an ageing body is automatically branded as an old/older body - which, in turn, connotes the myth of the crone. A crone is inclusive of 'barren' and 'withering' attributes. A mature body absent of these qualities may be denoted as an exception to the reference, yet the myth persists through the adjectives of 'old' and 'older' to a consumer culture captivated by youth. To quote curator and writer Ihor Holubizky, "I don't think myths can be demolished, nor "busted" -- i.e. the PBS Myth Busters program -- but they can atrophy."

In Beauty at the End of the Season, long spindly roses were photographed and printed in a manner so that they discreetly function as surrogates for the body. Each image was taken under varied lighting conditions to emphasize colour beyond naturalistic representation and was printed at 72" x 22". Mixed colour temperatures and low lighting have brought a painter's palette. The images taken after dark do not always look like night photos. Several images within this series remain un-cropped to enhance the mystique.

In smaller works, the photographic emulsion of the C-print is peeled off its paper support to create a surface description similar to that of wrinkled skin. While audiences may not assume a proxy, the modifications to the photographs suggest the attributes of an ageing body. Their graphic, seductive qualities thus bypass a negative ageism without denying maturity.