Chris Skylark’s artistic journey has been propelled by his curiosity and enthusiasm. The fine art photographer has a way of letting a chance encounter or unexpected conversation lead him to new discoveries and projects, most recent of which is “Swallow the Lake,” a collection of his photographic portraits shown as silkscreen prints. The works, which debuted in an abandoned office building in New York City this past September, exude the tension of needing to conceal and wanting to reveal. Here he tells Alix-Rose Cowie how his experimental approach to printing allowed him to rediscover a sense of childlike wonder, and to explore elusive, unexpressed feelings.
In September 2024, fine art photographer Chris Skylark had his first solo exhibition in Times Square Studios in New York City: textured, black-and-white silkscreen prints of his portraits of Frank Ocean, Playboi Carti and Anok Yai, displayed alongside portraits of people he photographed in Jamaica on a trip with Daniel Caesar. He could be cool and aloof, and let his star-studded work speak for itself, but he’s just too enthusiastic about what he’s doing. Skylark talks about his work with ease and candor, freewheeling through anecdotes and proving why so many of his “lucky breaks” and discoveries have happened through conversations with strangers. His openness is no doubt what gets his subjects to return the favor, whether they’re a celebrity, or somebody who caught his eye on the street.
Skylark grew up in Atlanta and was raised by music. Besides taking photos of his sneaker collection for Tumblr clout as a teenager, his first photographs documented the music scene around him, and his rapper friends on the rise. On scholarship at university, he signed up to a photography class for extra credit. What he didn’t know at the time was that taking photos of his friends for assignments would be the origin of his career—he’s since worked with the likes of Lil Yachty, Playboi Carti and Metro Boomin, documenting their journeys in the music industry and “contributing to their vision.” But hundreds of photographs later, he felt the need to share a vision of his own.
Locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic, unable to shoot new work, Skylark got creative with his existing images by playing with scale and printing them oversized. “I started trying to just get more physical with what I was doing,” he says. “That was the first major moment where I was like: I want to do something important and impactful.”
The works in “Swallow the Lake”—silkscreen prints of Skylark’s photographs—have been intentionally altered, stripped back or layered during the physical printing process. As with all the junctures in his career, he discovered the medium through a conversation; this time in Marc Jacobs’ LA store, Heaven, with a stranger who was wearing DIY screenprinted trousers. Eager to see how his photos would adapt to this medium, Skylark ended up in the stranger-now-friend’s backyard, screenprinting an old photograph he’d taken of A$AP Rocky onto watercolor paper. “It came out trash! It was kind of embarrassing,” he laughs, likening it to a Rorschach test, flooded with ink. “But it was fun and I had a great time making it.” He became obsessed with the craft, watching any footage he could find of Andy Warhol for clues on how he made his iconic screenprints. He went out of his way to see exhibitions of Warhol’s wall-sized works that he could inspect close-up. “He was doing shit at a scale that I couldn’t even fathom.”
It’s like an ode to your childhood, that childlike wonder that we lose a little bit when we get older.
Skylark found a print shop in New York and they invited him to apprentice at their warehouse. Between there and an artist friend’s studio in LA, he spent months “fucking shit up,” getting his hands dirty and his prints clean. “It taught me how to make mistakes on purpose,” he says. “That’s been the funnest part about it all. Just stumbling upon something, and you’re like, ‘Wait, that was cool. How do we do that again?’ It’s like an ode to your childhood, that childlike wonder that we lose a little bit when we get older.”
Meeting Ginevra de Blasio, who would end up curating his show, was also a chance encounter, this time in an elevator after complimenting each other’s outfits. Longer conversations followed in which de Blasio would prompt him to answer why he was making certain choices in his work and where his ideas stemmed from. Similar conversations with his late friend Louis Johnson were pivotal to Skylark uncovering what he wanted to say with his debut. “Pulling together a complete body of work that has to make sense thematically was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done,” he says, comparing it to interpreting your dreams.
More than simply a solo show, the project became a journey of self-reflection. “I realized I had embarked on this search for a deeper understanding of my own personal emotions,” Skylark says. “I started to revisit my past and childhood experiences that had been tucked in the back of my mind.” A close encounter he had with water and death at 12 years old came to the fore—an event that had altered his perspective on life. “Making this work became kind of a therapy for me in a way.” The themes that emerged for the show were life, death and water—water being a reflective surface that offers a blurred and rippled image of ourselves back to us.
The title of the show, “Swallow the Lake,” was borrowed from a 1970 collection of poetry by Clarence Major (also born in Atlanta) given to Skylark by Johnson before he passed. “[In the book] he speaks to the things considered during the show’s conceptualization,” Skylark says. “Life, death, water, loneliness and feelings that can’t be put into words.” This intangibility was pulled through into Skylark’s printmaking process, where he plays with layers and opacity to obscure his original portraits and create something more essential and emotional.
Skylark and de Blasio put on “Swallow the Lake” themselves in an abandoned office-turned-gallery space in Times Square; the carpets and cubicles ripped out but the false ceiling still in place. Promoting the show on social media, he wrote: No fancy galleries, no big art investors, just me and you. “I needed to make something that’s fine art-adjacent, but also still attainable, something that everyone can come see and maybe they’ll get inspired and want to go off and do something similar,” Skylark says. “The fine art world is super gate-kept. As a young aspiring artist from Atlanta, I need to do something for people like me.”
The considered selection of works serves as an introduction to him as an artist. In Skylark’s portraits of others—especially famous faces who are photographed so often—he strives to display a certain vulnerability or intimacy. So he felt it only fair to include a self-portrait in the show for others to interpret. But he’s made it difficult to read. “You almost have to tilt your head and squint to see that it’s an image of me.” Inspired by Warhol, he got into shooting vintage Polaroids. “They’re called peel-aways,” he says. “What Andy Warhol would do was take a picture, peel it away, and then you get to see the photo positive; the bright colorful image that shows you all the details.” Instead, his self-portrait shows the negative. The piece is a kind of key to unlocking the rest of the show: things can’t be understood at surface level. “The darkness of the image and the abstract white streaks serve as a veil between myself and the viewer,” he says. “It’s kind of scary to show all of me to all of you all at one time. This is my first show. We just met, you feel me? We just met.”