Dana Lok is a Pennsylvania native who is an up-and-coming artist who focuses on reimagining and challenging traditional norms and standards in her artwork. Lok wants to reinvent how artists perceive the passage of time and repetition in their work and expand on what many people are used to doing. Instead of these concepts occurring almost instantly or in her words “not unlike tricks in a magic show”, Lok performs time and repetition as stages occurring over time in her work. Lok wants her audience to see the processes of her thought and what would happen in nature. Lok hopes that her new take on art and the popularity of her work will also help other women who are struggling to make it in the art world.
Lok’s creative process is something that sets her apart from other famous artists around her. She is a constant user of repetition whenever she is making new artwork. This means that she likes to use the same image over and over again and reimagine it in different ways. The artwork depicted below is a part of Lok’s “Clima Artwork collection”, which represents the different stages and angles of a tree over time. Lok reuses a similar or in some cases the same image, which allows a passage of time to be shown. These slight and sometimes hard-to-find differences are what drive Lok’s creativity. Lok finds ways to make it seem like her work is occurring at multiple stages all at once. Her creative process is inspired by animation and focuses on the idea of time. She describes her work as being “Slow Frames”, which means its two subsequent frames at once, almost like steps in an animation. When Lok does this it allows her to look at her artwork from a different perspective. She draws on inspiration from early Disney films in which the simple cartoon-like animation makes the screen look like it has more depth to it. Lok associates time with knowledge and in her newer work, she intends to implement acquiring knowledge with her “Slow Frames” style by means of hands and fingers. Lok’s intent is that her artwork is grabbing or reaching for knowledge.
In terms of creativity, Lok tends to work in a collective thinking style. This means that Lok takes past knowledge from different areas of art to combine them into a style that works for her. Combining her love for Disney's animation and art, her love for art that depicts time, and her admiration for repetition in artwork, she is able to produce original art that speaks to her and the people who admire her. This has allowed Lok to become one of the current top female artists, she is doing something that others often struggle to do. Being able to combine different aspects of art into one piece of work is a difficult task to do. This results in what Lok would describe as "unexpected work" because of the multiple viewpoints. Lok wants to input a story into her work where it normally would not occur. The painting below, “Bunnies” is meant to represent this uncertainty with repetition and time. Lok wants her viewers to think, are these two bunnies at once or has there been a passage of time and this is the same bunny later into the night? Dana Lok wants her audience to continue to think and wonder what is truly happening in her work.
Sources:
https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/new-young-artists-to-watch-2022-gallery
https://www.artofchoice.co/dana-lok/
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/portfolio-74/
I had never heard of Dana Lok, but now I am super interested in finding out more about her art. I really like the idea that she incorporates time and repetition in her work and wants the audience to think about her art in a variety of ways. It is also really cool that they use the collective thinking style when it comes to using multiple art styles and drawing on their background with Disney.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of using art as a way to perceive the passage of time is fascinating, and one that Dana Lok employs beautifully. In a way, it is like we are going back to our roots. Television and technology have gotten so advanced that we often forget the work that was foundational to their existence. By using repetition and slightly altered images, Dana Lok creates art that I could spend hours looking at, trying to find all of the differences. Additionally, I think that there is something to be said about depicting the world around us through time. We are so set in the present moment, that we, like with technology, forget what it took to be where we are today. Creating art that articulates this feeling of awareness of our surroundings is beautiful and rare. After learning about her, I am eager to see some of Dana Lok's art in person.
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