Since the late 1960s Suzy Lake's conceptual and performance works have tackled themes of endurance, persistence and perpetuity, which often are markers of labor, domestic life and roles associated with women. Lake willingly takes on these prescribed burdens the way a jester takes on the ills of society, using herself as a mirror to reflect culture back upon itself. She has embodied these notions with acts of wrapping, sweeping, hanging, painting, dancing, smashing, looking and, of course, photographing. For Extended Breathing she enlists herself in the Sisyphean task of stillness, attempting to remain motionless for an hour while the world, human constructed and natural,  zooms past her unceasingly. She performs this task in various locations both private and public.

Lake says of this series:

For over 50 years, I have used the body as either the subject or its device to extend the metaphoric pose to performance. Since the mid-nineties, my work has addressed aging or ageism that resists empowering maturity as a ‘different beauty’. The Extended Breathing series challenges this taboo with an alternate beauty of perseverance and experience. This work considers how far I can reduce the activity’s narrative assumptions and still retain a body-reading that reveals itself in time. Recording full breath, breathing - is a celebration of life that required me to stand perfectly still before the camera for a set duration; accordingly, chest movement and torso sway were recorded while my feet remained anchored as crisp and detailed as the landscape. Yet, in the excess of the one-hour exposure, the recorded activity stops being a photographic document. What may have begun as endurance at one point in the project’s development becomes the gesture’s full durational movement through the slow shutter speed. The excitement for me was to find the balance with the lush detail and tonal saturation provided by pushing the camera’s optics without denying the performative event and gendered position.

Suzy Lake's work has been included in major surveys of feminist and conceptual art, including WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution 1965 – 1980,  MOCA, Los Angeles 2007; Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, the Art Gallery of Alberta, 2010-13; The Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and, Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avantgarde in the 1970s, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2012. And The Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s: Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna, curated by Gabriele Schor. Lake was the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014 Introducing Suzy Lake. She received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2016 and was the winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award. Lake's work has been collected by public institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, USA; the National Gallery of Canada; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.