Lane Cormick’s creative output is diverse and conceptual. His work draws from a wide array of influences including the aesthetics of the industrial and functional, investigation of skill and technique, performance, failure, music, modernist and contemporary culture. These influences feed into an art practice that is open-ended and without predictable outcome. Previous works have been created across various media including drawing, print-making, sculpture, installation and collaborative projects, performance and procedure. He has a commitment to impractical or unreasonable projects that test his skill and technique, and to work that is informed by conversation and obscure narratives that connect both to him and his community.

The work employs an interview with Wayne Kramer of the Detroit band MC5. The text comes from an online compilation of interviews with Kramer, which Cormick recently read and connected back to memory of being a teenager and having first heard Kramer in a radio interview — an early introduction to alternative music and “the seductive power of something cool”. Cormick’s work made in response comes out of his desire to find an obscure kernel of interest and influence, connecting back to an earlier and more easily impressed self. In effect, an attempt to create 'something cool’ in response.

Kramer emerges through the interviews at different points in his life, at moments of fame and recognition when young and hot, in later obscurity and working as a house builder, and interviewed after a jail term for drug dealing. Elements of his narrative resonate with Cormick and his work, and Kramer is indeed fascinating for his reflections on mortality, the gaining and losing of fame and money. However, Cormick notes that Kramer is not necessarily the most interesting member of MC5, the proto-punk rock band that emerged in the early 1960s in Detroit. As such, Cormick is less concerned with the character or creative output of Kramer, than he is with the ability of this figure to stand in for some of the codes that most interest Cormick — aesthetics of masculinity, performance, risk, spectacle, fandom and repetition. Cormick notes “it doesn’t matter who he was, he was just there for a split second. It could be anyone”.