Shannon Cartier Lucy
Woman with Machete
February 8 - April 25, 2020
For its inauguration, de boer gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Shannon Cartier Lucy. Entitled Woman with Machete, the exhibition will run from 8 February through 25 April 2020.
This exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of Shannon Cartier Lucy’s artwork in Los Angeles. While the works are meant to convey the in-between spaces and moments of life, they stand out in the boldness of their critique of the absurd, showcasing their own hyperawareness. The exhibit reflects the work of an experienced artist who takes the viewer on her artistic journey, from which a discerning narrative emerges, one that mirrors a very human experience - the rise and fall of relationships, recovery and reflection in drug addiction and a return to “home.”
In Woman with Machete, Lucy often includes herself painted in eerily familiar snapshots of the subconscious. The images she creates are strange, violent, and unsettling, but at the same time inviting and beautiful. Descriptions come easily at first glance; a tulip on a finger, dinnertime, woman under the sink, woman with machete. However, a deeper look points to a timeless, universal, and indefinable truth that is perhaps more real than what we take for granted as such. Michel Foucault describes these counter-sites as “heterotopias” for their contrast to utopias in his essay Of Other Places (1986). He describes heterotopias by saying, “places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”
In a recent interview with Hillary Reid for Vulture, Lucy describes wanting to be generous with her audience, “so people could step into it more easily, as she generally paints figures with the faces turned away. The paintings in Woman with Machete mark a turning point where faces are revealed along with our own inhibitions. Every painting is a key to a larger testament, a complex riddle where space is reconfigured and we can be reassured of our own idiosyncrasies. These paintings exist in a disordered reality where poetics are hilarious and disturbing subconscious thought is also relatable.
Though not explicit about her role as an influencer of cultural attitudes in an effort to transform stereotypes, she does describe her paintings on her website statement, “by expressing the simple, mundane and oppressive aspects of my own life perhaps these paintings can transmute my own inner experience into one which is felt more universally.”
Shannon Cartier Lucy (b. 1977, Nashville, TN) lives and works in Nashville and studied at New York University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Lucy left New York, where she studied with Lisa Yuskavage at NYU and exhibited alongside cult-like figures, such as Banks Violette and Genesis P-Orridge. Shortly after she received a Master of Science degree from the University of Tennessee. She has exhibited at Kathleen Cullen Gallery, New York, NY; Team Gallery, New York, NY; Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, NY. In 2020, she will present solo exhibitions at Lubov, New York, NY; and Nina Johnson, Miami, FL.
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Selected Works
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SHANNON CARTIER LUCY