News

OCTOBER 2013: LYON in Russia

Lyon is in Krasnodar, Russia, for the launch of the 5th Annual Photography Exhibition of Photovisa. His exhibition Stadia will be on display through November alongside work by Brad Temkin, Dona Schwartz and Patrick Gries. The Festival’s  theme is ” Climate of Changes: Life, Family, Society, Nature” curated by Irina Chmyreva, Senior Researcher, Russian Academy of Arts, National Institute of Theory and History of Art, Moscow, Russia.  Lyon will open Stadia on 20 October at the Krasnodar Gallery. In other news in the studio in London he is planning his next large scale  photographic portrait project “Somos Brasileiros”(We are Brazilians). This body of work is planned for production during 2014/15 and will see Lyon and his team traveling throughout Brazil to create an in-depth portrait commission reflecting the cultural and ethnic diversity of the emerging economic titan. The project will culminate in the production of an art book and an exhibition in 2016. Outside his own practice, Lyon was appointed to the Board of Somerset House this month.

STADIA – 2013

In the opening decade of the 21st century global sporting events have usurped all other forms of mass human worship. The stadium has become a modern house of reverence, defining our media age through more than just huge television audiences. These arenas are spaces of common human aspiration where the individual, society and the brand unite to create a new type of deity. Backed by enormous corporate funding the sports stadium has the ability to transform and renew, sending people to an emotional space of release through the visual and the auditory. In many ways all the great themes of religious redemption are replayed in modern stereo Technicolor: incarnation, suffering, glorification, resurrection and ultimately in victory salvation and in defeat, death.

This body of work explores one of the great shows of the modern age: The Paralympic Games. Lyon was given unique and exclusive access to all London 2012 venues with his large format camera by Olympic Games Photo Chief, Bob Martin. Over two weeks Lyon visited every arena used for the games to painstakingly record the spaces. He carefully chose the time of each visit  to choreograph a full spectrum of venues from full to empty, from training sessions to Gold Medal events.  This exacting schedule created a dynamic  vision of the event that records both the diversity and unity of such a huge logistical operation. The images endeavour to inspire the viewers with a deeper sense of the complete human story behind the actual games depicted, illuminating the architecture, sport, media, competitors and crowd as equal partners in a spectacle of biblical proportions.