Lucid Pleasures

Strata’s past two collections have focused on particular regions of the United States, the West and the South. Lucid Pleasures, which we curated in collaboration with Gnomic Book, surveys the surreal landscape of the current political and cultural moment in all its abundant absurdity. The books and images in this collection invite the viewer to look closer, and then look again, to find humor, beauty, and new possibilities for self-invention and -definition in an illogical and disorienting world.

As we made selections for Lucid Pleasures, we were looking for works that spoke to the present moment by exploring that nebulous intersection where fact and fantasy meet. The artists in this collection perform alchemy: they transform objects (including photographic ones) into stories that occupy mythic topographies and suggest alternate realities and relativities. The images illustrate and illuminate various acts of conception—a bowl with an egg and tadpoles, a meteor perched on the tip of a finger, a gridded landscape as evidence of a flat earth, the human remains of a bear hunt. They turn the everyday to spectacle, the domestic to cosmic, the living to machine, and they are dark comedies (a headless football player doesn’t need a helmet).

Lucid Pleasures occupies a territory that is personal, imaginary, and actual, a space of blurred lines and boundaries. The images are both document and dream. They interrupt/disrupt by asking questions about the medium itself. Do photographs lie or do they tell the truth? And how do we know the difference?

As always, Strata Editions is interested in sharing works that tell us stories about ourselves, and about how we tell those stories.