 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
London-based photographer Lucy Levene's large color images are on view in 511 Gallery's West Space.
Two projects form the show: "Come and Be My Baby" is an inside look at young London's nightclub scene, often from a familiar and de-glamourized perspective. Levene forthrightly but with empathy captures the pace and color of nighttime partying among the denizens of a popular club. One senses immediately that the artist is both a part of this scene and outside it looking in. The five works that make up this series show a sureness of visual conception and a handling of visual material that seem considerably more mature than this emerging artist's actual years would indicate.
In the seven exhibition prints entitled "Marrying In (Please God by You)," Levene takes a thoughtful yet quixotically humorous view of what it means to be young and Jewish and expected to marry someone of your own faith (whether or not you have any actual experience dating people of your faith). In her staged photographs of herself with young Jewish men in the settings of their homes, Levene again positions herself as both insider and outsider, looking out from the photograph as a dislocated subject at herself the "objective" photographer. "Marrying In" is a stark but funny scrutiny of the struggle to reconcile life with one's cultural and religious identities.
Lucy Levene was awarded the Silver prize in 2002's London Photographic Awards 5, and work from these two projects was the subject of a photoessay in the November 2002 issue of portfolio Magazine and Spectum Magazine (July, 2002). She has exhibited in the Project Room of The Collective Gallery in Edinburgh and was short-listed for New Contemporaries 2002 at the Barbican in London.
Lucy Levene received her BA with first class honors in 2001 from the Edinburgh College of Art and is presently in the Masters in Photography program at The Royal College of Art London.
