Shannon Cartier Lucy
The Loo Table

September 18, 2021–November 14, 2021
Reception: Saturday September 18, 6–8pm

 
 

If you touch the brass mechanism fitted at the base of a loo table, it will fold to make itself small and storable. It’s the effort of the game that makes for a small gathering. Many hands held small cards for the trick-taking game with the cute name; Lanterloo. Wrists would bend to match the wood grain that turns at the edge of an oval. Loo: a word that lifts the tongue to the roof of the mouth and rolls off and onto a surface. Loo is the loser, the runaway, a lullaby, and a 17th-century card game. Loo is as darling as the stomach of a dog. A pallet of gray browns and murky pinks that muddle with precision. It may be as clear - as - day or as sweet as the sweet spot.

Shannon Cartier Lucy’s paintings furnish a world of cutthroat silks and satins, a perfect union of macabre divinity, where pain, pleasure, self-sabotage, and self-preservation elide. The scenes arrive as passive visions and cerebral souvenirs, all shrouded in her past and present. They animate through nuance, small gestures, or blanket statements. You are describing the thing, but it will work against and around you. They are willful masters of escape. If you are waiting for the moment when the painting becomes pathological, don’t.

The gap between feel-good and foul play is at times so narrow that extracting one from the other becomes an arduous task. This lack of resolve marks the space between the viewer and the work, where attention shifts towards minor and interstitial moments of bliss, blur, and incongruence, like a moth to a flame. Tactfully sweet and unapologetically honest, Cartier Lucy images are as specific as they are untraceable. You are edging towards a reason, but the dead-end wins. Maybe it's just part of the game to feel forlorn or ecstatic by proxy of an image. If her paintings aren’t mirrored walls or wet dreams, then what can they do? Perhaps taking the high road is a matter of naming binaries: bizarre and ordinary, intimate and distanced, intriguing yet uncomfortable, comedic yet disturbed. There is space for endless narrative possibility, speculative fantasy, and choking on the hand that feeds you.

This kind of facility makes not only for a tight-knit canvas but captures what is both dear and perverse on the same plane; a union of perfect discord, with everywhere to run and nowhere to hide. Things familiar and kinky buoy to the surface because they can. What ties itself to the experience of her work is bittersweet and unforgiving. Shannon Cartier Lucy gives way to a hypnotic world founded on taboo and ambiguity, where psychic undertones are padded in sucrose and relentless in their grace.

— Claire Sammut, September 2021

Lubov is pleased to present The Loo Table — painter Shannon Cartier Lucy’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, following her New York solo debut in January 2020. Drawing together nine oil on canvas paintings, the exhibition includes seven new works Cartier Lucy has created specifically for the show, presented alongside two paintings from 2018 that have never before been exhibited publicly. On occasion of the exhibition, Hassla Books is publishing Cartier Lucy’s first monograph, titled Better Call it Grace. Created through a close collaboration among Cartier Lucy and Lubov, New York, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, Massimo de Carlo, Milan, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Soft Opening, London, the publication unites images of all the artist’s paintings from 2017 to 2021, along with essays contributed by independent curator Claire Sammut and writer and artist Adam Lehrer.

Shannon Cartier Lucy (b. 1977 Nashville, Tennessee) is a Nashville-based painter whose practice explores art’s ability to evoke feelings of the liminal and uncanny.

In 2019 and 2021 she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Recent solo exhibitions include Night Gallery, Los Angeles (forthcoming), Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong (forthcoming), The Loo Table at Lubov, New York (2021); Cake on the Floor at Soft Opening, London (2021); Fooled Again at Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020); The Ever-Flashing Strap at Nina Johnson, Miami (2020); Woman with a Machete at De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles (2020) and Home is a crossword puzzle I can’t solve at Lubov, New York (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Bodywork: Discomfort and Existence at Massimo de Carlo, Milan (2021); (Nothing but) Flowers at Karma, New York (2020) and Eigenheim at Soft Opening, London (2020).

Lucy graduated with a BA from New York University (2000) followed by a MS from the University of Tennessee (2017). The artist lives and works in Nashville.

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