With the kind support of ARTBUTLER Art World Solutions and ARTLAND.
IN THE RACK ROOM presents TABAK UND TABU, an exhibition by British artist Alana Lake spanning the mediums of photography, sculpture and painting. The exhibition explores altered states of being achieved through sex, drugs and desire. Lake’s work has been influenced by her studies in Psychoanalysis at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research, London. Her work expresses and reflects her extended interests in this field, where Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian theories meet in order to produce an emergent vocabulary that skillfully combines traditional methods of glass blowing, industrial materials and painterly techniques, drawing from a rich tapestry of dreamworks and subconscious forces.
Lakes work romances with death, there is often a prevailing melancholic tone and a preoccupation with beauty concealed within everyday phenomenon capturing a raw and primal energy. Unexpected juxtapositions and jarring edits easily unsettle the viewer sucking them into an intersection of forces hovering somewhere between the beautiful and the mundane and the horror of the sublime. Dark humor makes light of taboo subject matters whilst her sensitivity to material qualities transmute personal encounters into something of a more universal experience.
Alana Lake is a British artist and curator living and working between Manchester and Berlin. Born in Tamworth, 1981, she studied at the Arts University College at Bournemouth graduating with a BA (Hons) in Photography in 2004 and later she studied Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts London from 2006-2009, completing her Teacher Training in-between. She has also studied Psychoanalysis at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, a subject that continues to inform her research and fine art practices in painting, sculpture and photography. Lake received funding from the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 2021 and was further awarded the Project Space & Initiatives Award, by the Berlin Cultural Senate in 2018, the Dunoyer de Segonzac Award in 2009, the Michael Moser Award, in 2008 and the Hines Photographic Scholarship between 2007-2008.
*IN THE RACK ROOM is the new side curatorial project of Pierre Granoux, based in his former artist studio, today his storage room. Each selected artist is invited to work in this rack room and to question “the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed” (Brian O’Doherty). The creative act will be documented and displayed as an Instagram takeover: @intherackroom
