Independent New York 2023
May 11–14, 2023
Spring Studios
50 Varick St
New York, NY 10013
Connor Marie Stankard
Spring Studios
50 Varick St
New York, NY 10012
Thursday VIP Opening, May 11 (invitation only): 10am – 8pm
Friday, May 12: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, May 13: 11am – 8pm
Sunday, May 14: 11am – 6pm
For this year’s Independent fair, Lubov presents a series of new works by Connor Marie that you might mistake for beautiful paintings of beautiful girls: wan faces and wraith-like limbs, drips of color like juice-pressed body fluids. Connor has a talent for making girlishness alarming despite its prettiness: here, we are shown the perfect calm that follows total derangement, features that have been rearranged into faces following a fit. This Art has been very bad. It has thrown a terrible tantrum, knowing it can get away with it—and it has. The only evidence (smeared lipstick, watery mascara, biofluid) is on the canvas, dissolving into Painting.
These girl-things are made of makeup and mud. They’re not real girls, though: not only because Connor references digitally-generated faces, hentai, and clickbait language fragments (Horse Won’t Stop Hugging Pregnant Woman [...]), but because the brushstrokes that congeal into impossibly magnetic eyes and perfect little bee-stung pouts seem to do so accidentally. It’s like a neural net trying to make an abstract painting and failing to not hallucinate girls because It—“It” being something like Art—has been trained to love girls just as much as we have. No matter the input, the output is girlish.
Both Connor’s artworks and their subjects are chimeras, siren smoothies of animal and machine, angel and demon, oil paint and artificial intelligence: blended up, nice and sweet, strategically camouflaged as Beautiful-Girl-Paintings—and all for our pleasure. If these paintings resemble girls, it’s because you want them to.
—Olivia Kan-Sperling, April 2023.
Connor Marie Stankard (b. 1992) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from Pace University in 2015 and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Ava, Chloe, Blair, Nicole, Lubov, New York (2022, reviewed in the October 2022 print issue of Artforum); Cloaca Palace, The Anderson, Virginia (2021); A Mosquito’s View, FAB Gallery, Virginia (2020); Stirring in the Mantle, Motel (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, King's Leap, Kimberly Klark, Tuesday, Allen & Eldridge, and Page NYC. Connor will have a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, CA in 2024.