Lily LaGrange’s Solo Show Is All About “Chance and Magic”

Hovering against the wall, the Syracuse-based artist’s solo show “Free Tempo Pendulum” exhibits a “clothesline” display of photo papers, each featuring an inkjet-printed black-and-white image of rocks in midair. Instead of being encapsulated in rigid glass pane frames, each print is suspended through two binder clips on the upper edges which are meticulously hung on pins in the gallery walls. 

LaGrange cites her unconventional choice of exhibition as a desire to have her form of presentation “mimic the work.” “It has movement to it, it’s not fixed to the wall just as the rocks are in [the photos],” LaGrange says. For the artist, it was also a resourceful way to bypass the expensive and time-consuming framing process. According to The Rhodes Arts Center Gallery Director and visual arts faculty Charley Neisner, LaGrange’s flexibility in presenting her work is what earned her the role of kickstarting the 2023 gallery shows. “I knew she was ready,” he says. 

LaGrange finds her peculiar subjects of depiction within quarries around Syracuse. “It is a place where I can enter the earth – a sort of open wound,” she explains. Haunted and ghostly, the artist collects her specimens within these sites where human intrusion was forcefully interjected. The array of rocks could almost be understood as flecks of earthly flesh, and their diverse variations provide a paradoxical organicity through an artificial, inorganic process: an outcome that LaGrange tries to harness. 

Throughout the creation of her works, however, LaGrange began to question less about her intentions of creation, but rather immersed herself within her interactions with the subjects: “the simple gesture of throwing a rock into the air.” For LaGrange, there is some whimsicalness in this process of juxtaposing something that is intuitively understood as heavy and static with a state of being that is light in nature. There is also pleasure in recreating these moments, which she describes as “the Sissyphysian repetitive action.” 

LaGrange cites two impetuses which guide the production of her work. On one hand, she wants to expose the moments which are too fast for the human eye to capture. To highlight this intention, the artist deliberately made her photographs monochromatic through digital manipulation to engage the historical reference of Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was an early English photographer known for his utilization of photography as a form of motion study, his most famous work being a series of sequential photographs depicting a man on a galloping horse. (This imagery was also used as a lead in the recent Jordan Peele film “Nope” as the film unravels an attempt to capture the image of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

But more importantly, LaGrange is driven by the unpredictability of creating these photographs, what she refers to as “chance and magic,” a rather rebellious gesture as a photographer. “I’m not in control, which is something that’s pretty different from the history of photography,” she explains. “Usually the photographer has the gaze – it’s their pose, their designing; whether it is a still life or a portrait, it’s their scene.” Her change in principles have produced results that have even sometimes surprised herself. With a digital camera, an attached flash, and a couple of tries on each shot, LaGrange is able to create works that seem surreal. 

“‘How do you do that?’ is my favorite question,” LaGrange says with a smile. The simple answer, whether to the physical or technological process, is often what brings the audience – Neisner included – into more fascination. But LaGrange simultaneously does not feel like she is treading on the boundary of what photography is supposed to be. “When so much of the photography industry is developed, quote-on-quote, on documenting reality, I don’t believe in that,” she states. With so much manipulation and deliberation already happening behind the scenes, LaGrange feels that she is merely pushing the boundaries to the other end of the spectrum, capturing the ethereal and the seemingly unreal. 

The lack of human presence in the photos reflects LaGrange’s concern with “object-oriented ontology.” A critical theory that deflects humans from the center of existence, it allows LaGrange to place herself in the role of just a “facilitator.” “[All these rocks] have agency, they are renegotiating their own relationships with reality,” she stresses. For the artist, acknowledging this folds into her idea of presenting “chance and magic” in her work as the geological time that allows the rocks to be in existence, her performative gesture of throwing them, and the technological time of the camera shot all comes together in serendipity. This serendipity also extends out of the photographs to those viewing them: LaGrange does not aim to elicit any specific response from the viewers; she welcomes all interpretations. The encounter between the audience and the work and the meaning-making process which derives from that should be random and subjective, adding a fourth layer onto the irreplicability of the photographs. 

“The richest part of the artmaking experience is the intimate relationship with the materials,” comments visual arts faculty Jamie Rourke, upon viewing LaGrange’s works. “It's touching, feeling, and seeing your natural surroundings, and trying to pull from that a sort of meaning or belonging, and sharing that with the viewer.” For LaGrange, all that meaning dwells within the “chance and magic.”

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