NYAB Event - Mayumi Lake "Æther"

Mayumi Lake "Æther"

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

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MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects presents Æther, an exhibition of a new photographic series by Chicago-based artist Mayumi Lake. This is Lake's fourth solo exhibition with MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects.

Mayumi Lake has been evoking emotional responses from her viewers for years. This time, she provides her own reaction first. In her new portraits of young women and pubescent girls, ominous illumination and vintage costumes add an evocative and uncanny tone to an otherwise genteel subject matter. Some of the subjects are posed in austere Victorian dress covering their feminine curves while others play schoolgirls wearing mini-skirt uniforms. Their shapes and facial expressions are obscured in strategic shadow. According to Lake, these unconventional portraits are based on historical or culturally specific stereotypes, and all of them have one thing in common: For the artist, these women and girls posses the power to inspire a sense of awe.

After tracing the difficult lives of her own mother and grandmother during the WWII in her "Ex Post Facto" series (2009), Lake was intrigued by the legacy of the Countess Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi (nee Aoyama, 1874-1941), a pioneering Japanese woman who migrated to Europe in the late 19th Century and married into a prominent European family. Upon visiting the countess' grave, Lake was struck by an inexplicable, overwhelmingly emotional unease which inspired Lake to find compelling female archetypes that she admired and feared at the same time. In Æther, Lake invites these women out of the darkness much as a medium calls forth spirits. It is through this deeply personal and intimate relationship with her own phobia and fantasies that Lake injects authenticity into her disquieting female portraits.