Working in both analogue and digital technologies, Lucas Blalock addresses photography’s relationship to how we perceive the world around us. He is especially interested in social interactions with cameras. While taking and sharing photographs have become pervasive acts, regular engagement with such images does not necessarily mean that, as a culture, we have become more visually literate. In Strawberries (forever fresh) and Strawberries (fresh forever), sixteen strawberries (of various stages of ripeness) are carefully laid out on a layer of bubble wrap. In one image, iconic stylized strawberry hard candies appear on top of the berries. Just as each berry is subtly different, so too is each wrapped confectionary. Then, the image is flipped and the strawberries are overlaid on top of the candies. These images started as two separate negatives that were then “finished” with the aid of computer technology. About the work’s creation, Blalock recounts, “I really like objects that sort of act like photographs, that sort of are imitators of the things they are trying to be . . . so I made this picture of the candies. . . . They actually sat on my table for a day or two and it popped into my head that maybe I should replace them with the real thing. What ended up happening was that I thought about them through this overlay of one sort of taking the place of the other.”

Label from For the Love of Things: Still Life, February 27–May 29, 2016