Suzy Lake

Waddington's Auction House Biography and Notes

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1947, Suzy Lake is regarded as one of a pioneering group of visual artists to adopt performance, video and photography to explore the politics of body, gender and identity. Upon completing her studies at Wayne State University and Western Michigan University, she immigrated to Montreal in 1968. There, almost ten years later, she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia. While her formal studies were in fine arts, she is largely self-taught in the film, photography, video and performance art fields. She was Guido Molinari’s studio assistant in the early 1970s and, as an active member of the Montreal artistic communities throughout that decade, she co-founded the artist-run avant-garde gallery Véhicule Art Inc. in 1972. She was profoundly influenced by the social and political movements of the 60s and 70s. Lake is well recognized for her large-scale photography, which reflects the politics of feminism and references the body as both subject and device. Indeed, she practises a form of conceptual art that uses photography more as a means of communication and inquiry than a record of reality. Lake has had an extensive exhibition career, with successful shows in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Her work is represented in many public collections, including those of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal and the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York.