Lam works in oil
and her technique is laborious: she slowly building up her image through
successive layers of glazes that must be applied when the surface is wet. This
means she has a limited window of time when she can work. Being on a residency
for an extended period without interruption is vital to her process. “When I’m
at home, things get in the way so I have to reactivate the medium again because
I’ve left it too long.” Lam uses an extended medium that allows her about 24
hours, nevertheless, after two hours, the surface gets tacky and she has to
reactivate it. “If I keep it wet, I can keep it going.”
Lam works from
photographs, altering the images to create a negative version of the original
in order to disrupt the way we look at normalized images. “I manipulate the
photograph through filters and Photoshop, it’s still black and white, but I
invert it and amplify things. For me, this is important in two ways. This
particular fire is a night scene so normally it would all be black, but when
you invert it, the black areas become white and the white becomes black.
Initially, I was more interested in the fire as being light and hot. If you
ever see a night fire, it draws you in—but I wanted to see what would happen if
you reversed it. Normally, light is seen as life-giving; think of all the
mythologies of fire, it’s the source of heat and energy and how we cook, but
then in a different context, like a house fire, it’s very destructive. When you
make it black it’s almost a psychological flip in one’s mind. So in some ways
the blackness—it still could be like smoke so it’s ephemeral, but to me, the
blackness is a psychological internal solidification that happens by making
that choice to make it black.” The inversion is not only optically interesting,
but it creates confusion. Is it fire or is it smoke? It’s hard to tell and if
it’s both where one begins and the other ends. The smoke is an effect of the
fire, but maybe it’s going out, or maybe it’s just beginning? There’s uncertainty.
At what point of the emergency are we at?
At first, Lam’s
palette looks like monochrome black and white, but almost immediately you see a
distinct pink cast to the painting. This adds a lovely soft aura that’s
startling, eliciting, on the one hand, an emotional response akin to a kind of
dreamy nostalgia, and on the other, bafflement at how weirdly at odds it is to
the catastrophic image depicted. This effect is only enhanced by the refined
delicacy of Lam’s approach. She depicts the hard edges and nebulous shapes with
perfect veracity and an overall restraint. The end result is a painting that is
mysterious, and as ineffably beautiful as it is haunting.
Lam uses the pink
as a reference to the type of source image she’s painting from. “I’m conveying
that the print itself has an aberration—it’s not color corrected—sometimes
you’ll have a cheap printer which will have a pink tone. I like to include
those little hiccups as part of the palette to create an image that has a
distant imprint of its source, like a patina. It looks like its black and
white, but you’re not quite sure, and the effect will remind you of something.
That’s part of the interest I have in perception in terms of recognizing the
image, locating the source, but also in the way we experience it through the
color. So one ongoing investigation in the work has been this interest in
lightness and darkness, but also the idea of the imprint of an experience. A
manifestation of this is the shadow and in in this case, it’s the idea of what survives
after a disaster. Even the idea of the smoke and the fire as a type of
ephemeral shadow as well.”
The inverted image
also achieves a kind of solarization effect. It’s as if she’s captured the
scene lit fleetingly by a great flash of light that has crystalized the moment
of disaster.
For her subject
matter, Lam tries to find actual houses because she wants to reference actual
events, but it’s actually very hard to find them. By the time a news crew
arrives at the scene, the house is usually too far-gone. Of the images she has
found, Lam has had to sift through to make sure they weren’t intentionally set
by the fire department for training purposes. But these also interest her.
“Trying to understand which are real and which aren’t has led me down a rabbit
hole thinking about the reliability of these images. What is the source
imagery? How is it disseminated?”
She was able to
verify this one as an actual house fire that occurred in Wainfleet, Ontario.
But she has been tracking another one for the past year and has found no clear
provenance. “It’s so strange because it’s such a popular image; it’s been
re-appropriated so many times that its context has been emptied out. I figured
out it’s on a meme generator website and in the last three months, the number
of images, or websites that have been re-appropriating it are multiplying.
Before I arrived, a couple of weeks ago, it was up to 700. People are using
these images like clip art for things like home insurance websites, but also
some of them are accompanying online blogs or narratives that have nothing to
do with the specific house, or even a fire. I’ve found it on amateur news blogs
that are reporting on a real fire, just not this one. If you read the news
story closely, it won’t actually ever say this is the image of the fire. But to
look at it superficially, you would think it was. That made me really think
about the truth-value in the things that we see. We’re always looking at things
online or even in the newspaper and thinking it’s suspect, but it became much
more clear. And the fact people are doing it so boldly is so interesting.”
There’s a
serendipity that comes into play Lam’s process. For instance, the two figures
on the bottom left of the painting were a discovery, made when she inverted the
image. She didn’t see them in the original because of the darkness. Their
proximity and seeming disinterest in the conflagration going on beside them is
peculiar. At first Lam suspected that maybe the fire was intentionally set. But
she has verified that it is real and they are firemen whose aspect and position
are somewhat distorted. Between them is another unlikely vignette, what appears
to be a horse or cow calmly grazing. Because it was a poor quality image to
begin with, it could have been just a weird formation, but to Lam, this
ambiguous blur registered as a pastoral scene and she wanted to depict it as
she saw it, shaped by what she personally projected onto the image.
Nowadays, it’s
hard to shock people because everything is out there easily accessible, easily
seen. Maybe because a house fire has a quotidian quality—we are all at risk—it
resonates so deeply with us. It’s interesting that Lam achieves a reaction of
fear, or at least foreboding, in the viewer using such quiet means. She is
trying to understand what one’s engagement with the images is. “We all are
exposed to disturbing events whether they be personal or external and how to
respond to them. I’m trying to work through a romanticization or a dwelling in
things. There’s enough atrocity and disaster around us. How do we work through
all that and arrive at something generative. The reality is that those events
and that feeling will always be there; it’s an experience that we have to
acknowledge.”
