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The young British photographer Lucy Levene, in her solo exhibition, Night Shift, shows large (30 x 40") c-prints of her peers within the interior spaces of London's clubs and discos.
In extending her earlier project, Come and Be My Baby, for which she took a silver at the London Photographic Awards and was shortlisted for the Archibald Harley Prize in Scotland, Levene now explores even more provocatively how people place and use their bodies within the architecture that is the nightclub. Couples kissing, conversing intensely, drinking and smoking, dancing, resting, moving wobbily, at the bar or in plush chairs , locked in embraces in dark recesses of hallways - we recognize the "moves" and the stances as ones we have all assumed at times. With an uncanny sense for realistic representation - always staying well shy of photo-documentation - the artist probes her own class and generation with acute attention to detail and anthropology, but always with sensitivity for the situation: her subjects are not posed or staged, but on some level they must realize that the photographer is taking their pictures; and the artist's own awareness that they do realize this renders her both insider and outsider in the dark spotlit space.
Lucy Levene was schooled at the Edinburgh College of Art and received her MFA in May from the Royal College of Art London. Her work is in Progressive Corporation's collection of contemporary art in this country, and her new photographs will be the subject of a feature article in the year-end issue of portfolio Magazine. This is the artist's second solo exhibition in New York.
