The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
May 7 – October 11, 2021
Deana Lawson creates images that are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent. Her photographs and films result from collaborations with strangers whom the artist encounters by chance or deliberately seeks out. These individuals are often depicted within richly textured domestic settings in which the details of décor, lighting, and pose are precisely choreographed. In this way, Lawson draws on the legacies of historical portraiture, documentary photography, and the family album, but transcends these traditions, constructing scenes that merge lived experience with imagined narratives.
In this exhibition, large-scale photographs, some of which are embedded with holograms, are arrayed in a dense constellation that surrounds a spectral rendering of a torus—a three-dimensional shape formed by a circle rotated around a central axis. As such, the installation draws on the thermodynamic concept of centropy, a term that describes how the electrification of matter leads to regeneration and harmonious order. The same impulse of renewal through creative energy is central to Lawson’s vision, in which her subjects are figured as ineffably splendid, occupying a world that they command absolutely.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Lawson has conceived this 20-minute film, which expands upon the personal histories and thematic structures that inflect the installation in the gallery. Also titled Centropy, the film is a meditative visual essay that encompasses interviews with individuals who have been formative to Lawson’s life and work, archival footage, and evocations of the artist’s process. It approaches from oblique angles topics including ancestral histories, Black ecologies, and the science of holography.
Directed by Lawson with cinematography by Bradford Young, the film was produced by the filmmaking collective The Ummah Chroma under its banner, Ummah Chroma Creative Partners (UCCP). To watch Centropy, click here.
To learn more about the Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy, at the Guggenheim Museum, click here.