Untitled from the Women’s Portrait series

Joan Lyons is an American artist working in photography and photocopier-based media since the 1970s. Her practice centers on experimental image-making that treats the photocopy machine as a generative tool rather than a reproduction device, layering, distorting, and recombining found photographs and printed matter to create abstract and figurative hybrids. Based in upstate New York, she has been associated with the image-processing innovations of the Xerox Art Program. Her work interrogates the relationship between original and copy, analog reproduction and digital manipulation, in ways that prefigured contemporary image culture.