Novak Synopsis

by Ron Witherspoon

Lorie Novak’s work could serve as a model for process and presentation. Novak challenges and works with metaphors of personal and collective memory so concisely, that her works could be used by psychotherapists to elicit memory recall.

Initially working with her family photographs projected into rooms, then re-photographed and re-projected, Lorie began a journey to the soul. Her layering of imagery not only connotes time and place in order to change the meaning of an image, but it also creates a bigger emotional picture.

From her re-photographed indoor images to the projected photographs in a natural landscape, Novak explores the concept of projecting thoughts wherever one may go. Novak takes herself, and surely her audience, on an inward trek to reveal a hidden truth through forgotten memories. Novak also explores death and decay by projecting photographs onto trees and nature. She also explores growing up as a female by using school pictures from throughout her early school years in her projections.

Novak’s latest project is a combination of her own family images and photographs from other families installed with audio response of those images by the viewers. What is evoked is a rich dialogue between the audience, the projected images and the personal memory recall.

Novak Analysis

by Danny Yahav-Brown

While watching Lorie Novak’s slides, which were taken from her project in Alice Island, I couldn’t stop thinking of pictorial representations of holy scenes in chapels during the Renaissance. Novak’s projection of family snap shots on the walls of a long deserted corridor came across as a comment to this old pictorial tradition. However, more than just being a tongue in cheek gesture, it seems to me that this specific image can represent a proper starting point for discussing different implications of Novak’s work as a whole.

The Alice Island series was interesting to me on two levels. The first one has to do with the relationship between the actual physical space (either the architectural structure of the prison’s walls, or the outdoors) and the projected image. The second one deals with Novak’s insistence on using still images rather than time-based images (video projection). But this will change later on when Novak starts using video projection in her work.

On the first level, Novak’s work juxtaposes a virtual space, that of the projected photographs and the actual space, with that of the prison. Personal memory is being blended with a collective one; the private is being blended with the public. This procedure allows Novak to go back and forth between the literal and the metaphorical, suggesting allusive space--one that is in a constant state of expending and shrinking. Novak is interested in creating a multi-layered effect where one space is being contained by another. Hence, the end product in the gallery--a still photograph-- represents the space of the snap shot that is being projected in the space of the prison, that is being photographed and transformed into a still photograph.

By eclipsing the boundaries between the signified and the signifier, and by creating the picture within the picture effect, Novak keeps the viewers deprived of any kind of photographic truth, which asks them to doubt and reconfigure, yet again, the validity of the photographic image as evidence.

In her recent installation, “Collective Visions”, Novak projected slides accompanied by sound. I find this piece very intriguing in the sense that it raises questions in regards to the cinematic relationship between still images and time based images. In that respect, her installation has some similarities to Chris Marker’s “La Jetee”. The use of the still rather than a video projection or film constitutes a critical moment in the history of the image--a moment that slightly breaks from the cinematic grammar. Rosalind Krauss successfully articulates this moment as the final image. Krauss continues to ask whether this final image is the one that we would see at the moment of our deaths--an image whose approach we can narrate cinematically but whose occurrence can only produce an explosively static still.


	ARTIST PRESENTATION Lorie Novak Novak Synopsis by Ron Witherspoon Lorie Novak’s work could serve as a model for process and presentation. Novak challenges and works with metaphors of personal and collective memory so concisely, that her works could be used by psychotherapists to elicit memory recall. Initially working with her family photographs projected into rooms, then re-photographed and re-projected, Lorie began a journey to the soul. Her layering of imagery not only connotes time and place in order to change the meaning of an image, but it also creates a bigger emotional picture. From her re-photographed indoor images to the projected photographs in a natural landscape, Novak explores the concept of projecting thoughts wherever one may go. Novak takes herself, and surely her audience, on an inward trek to reveal a hidden truth through forgotten memories. Novak also explores death and decay by projecting photographs onto trees and nature. She also explores growing up as a female by using school pictures from throughout her early school years in her projections. Novak’s latest project is a combination of her own family images and photographs from other families installed with audio response of those images by the viewers. What is evoked is a rich dialogue between the audience, the projected images and the personal memory recall. Novak Analysis by Danny Yahav-Brown While watching Lorie Novak’s slides, which were taken from her project in Alice Island, I couldn’t stop thinking of pictorial representations of holy scenes in chapels during the Renaissance. Novak’s projection of family snap shots on the walls of a long deserted corridor came across as a comment to this old pictorial tradition. However, more than just being a tongue in cheek gesture, it seems to me that this specific image can represent a proper starting point for discussing different implications of Novak’s work as a whole. The Alice Island series was interesting to me on two levels. The first one has to do with the relationship between the actual physical space (either the architectural structure of the prison’s walls, or the outdoors) and the projected image. The second one deals with Novak’s insistence on using still images rather than time-based images (video projection). But this will change later on when Novak starts using video projection in her work. On the first level, Novak’s work juxtaposes a virtual space, that of the projected photographs and the actual space, with that of the prison. Personal memory is being blended with a collective one; the private is being blended with the public. This procedure allows Novak to go back and forth between the literal and the metaphorical, suggesting allusive space--one that is in a constant state of expending and shrinking. Novak is interested in creating a multi-layered effect where one space is being contained by another. Hence, the end product in the gallery--a still photograph-- represents the space of the snap shot that is being projected in the space of the prison, that is being photographed and transformed into a still photograph. By eclipsing the boundaries between the signified and the signifier, and by creating the picture within the picture effect, Novak keeps the viewers deprived of any kind of photographic truth, which asks them to doubt and reconfigure, yet again, the validity of the photographic image as evidence. In her recent installation, “Collective Visions”, Novak projected slides accompanied by sound. I find this piece very intriguing in the sense that it raises questions in regards to the cinematic relationship between still images and time based images. In that respect, her installation has some similarities to Chris Marker’s “La Jetee”. The use of the still rather than a video projection or film constitutes a critical moment in the history of the image--a moment that slightly breaks from the cinematic grammar. Rosalind Krauss successfully articulates this moment as the final image. Krauss continues to ask whether this final image is the one that we would see at the moment of our deaths--an image whose approach we can narrate cinematically but whose occurrence can only produce an explosively static still.