Artist Lala Crafford‘s work revolves around themes relating to perception and how we experience the everyday through the use of ephemeral mediums such as shadows, light and sound, explored mainly through installation work. How we gain insight through sight has been a running theme for Lala over the past year. Growing up on a game farm where is was often given the task of holding the spotlight during night-time game drives, she believes that any kind of artist has the responsibility to hold the metaphorical ‘spotlight’ in everyday life- to shed light on or to generate experiences around what we often take for granted.
Lala started her two week residency with Floating Reverie run by digital practitioner Carly Whitaker – an online residency where artists are invited to work on a creative process repeatedly for two weeks. She has since been creating images for her theme, #everydayfilters. Tying in with her curiosity around perception, the focus of the work she will be producing throughout the residency will play with the idea of what a filter means, especially on social media, considering how they have become part of how we frame and experience images. She uploads the unedited images she produces daily on to her Instagram account, as a platform associated with the use of filters as well as a platform that has become part of everyday life. “Instead of using Instagram filters or typical filters that you would apply to images of everyday life, I decided to use physical objects as filters, seeing as those physical objects are also part of our everyday lives,” Lala explains.
With a mobile device being associated with Instagram, she covers the camera on her phone with the filter she has decided to work with for the day. These include cloth, wire mesh, glass bottles filled with water and ink, acetate with raindrops, with an emphasis on improvising her filter choices.
The themes of her images are similar to what she describes as typical Instagram images, such as photographs of her dog, her boyfriend, landscapes, and balcony views. She uses hashtags which relate directly to the residency such as #postinternetart #internetart and #digitalart. However, she also uses hashtags related such as #boyfriendsofinstagram to make her work appear more “Instagram-y” and less like art, to see what that does.This offers a point of comparison to see how her images look in relation to images uploaded not necessarily for the same purpose by others under the same hashtag.
The work she has developed so far engages with the idea of the filter as an object in and of itself, and not simply a screen that creates interesting visual effects but is ultimately looked past. This is emphasized by the fact that in some of the images you are not able to see what is behind the filter – it is no longer something to just look through. “[In these cases] the filter took over and became the most important thing,” Lala explains.
Check her out on Instagram to follow how the last week of her residency unfolds.
