Evan LaLonde’s A Camera is a Room

Portland State Master’s of Fine Arts candidate Evan LaLonde’s work will be on display Monday, April 2, through Wednesday, April 11, in the Autzen Gallery, located on the second floor of Neuberger Hall. The opening reception will be held Thursday, April 5, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Evan will be displaying cyanotypes in his exhibition A Camera is a Room. In choosing pieces for the exhibition, Evan made a special point to utilize the natural light in the gallery.

The negatives used to print the images in A Camera is a Room did not originate inside a camera, nor did they come from two-dimensional images. They came from painted forms disguised to look like negatives. When painted with inverted colors, the surfaces of these objects are activated in strange ways, and their form flattens.

The translation that first happens outside the camera occurs again inside the camera, where it applies its own mimetic “painting” process. The resulting images hover somewhere between the real and the cinematic, where the imagined confronts the absolute.

The title A Camera is a Room implies that these photographic objects might still live inside the camera and remain unformed. It also aims to reveal a dream-like translation that occurs in all things photographic, according to the exhibition statement.

LaLonde is an artist working and living in Portland. He holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institue College of Art and will receive his MFA from PSU this spring.