Christine
Lyon

“The female body drips, spills, stains, and folds in on itself; fat gathers, flesh sags, menstrual blood pools. The figures in my work embody this experience in their fluidity, precariousness, and shiftlessness, along with the materiality of paint and ink. Layers of personal and cultural imagery to create a labyrinth of tales about my complicated emotions, fantasies, and realities. I use tissue boxes, spilling messes of nail polish and food, popping pimples, film references, screens, flashlights, exaggerated limbs and poses to inform these narratives about feminized and pathologized gestures.

The figure in my work exists somewhere between my body and the classic Rubenesque or Greco-Roman female. Color and iconography are used to connote her pathology. Grappling with the western tradition of the reclining nude and the bather, I contend not only with her femininity, but also the sensuality of her lethargy: the performance and expectations of relaxation versus the reality of distress, and the catatonic states of depression, anxiety, and ADHD that are often misconstrued as laziness. She speaks to the enervation of feeling overwhelmed and the problems of that inertia in an era that desperately calls for action. By combining varied times and spaces into the same plane, everything happens at once, and yet, in its stagnant objecthood, nothing happens at all.

My compositions derive from both real and illusory domestic sites, the amalgamation of have-been and might-have-been experiences in ex-boyfriends’ houses, childhood bedrooms, and absentee-landlord-owned creaky lofts. My sketchbook and creative writing practices reveal a pattern: I am drawn to storytelling, specifically psychology-centered narratives around themes of “The Other,” mental-illness, cons, hypocrisy, safety, love, hauntings, half-truths, and forgetting.

In these large scale figure paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures languid female forms, and pop culture references are painted in high contrast. Often in the RGB color scheme, these scenes allude to the screens that my figures are fixated on, escape into, and from which their aesthetic is inspired. The figures confront the viewer with their blank sunken gaze, but also retreat into the world of the painting. Gestural lines are variable, weaving in and out of shadows. My doppelgängers interact with each other and their audience, across timelines and realms, weaving in and out of fiction, memoir, painting, poetry, and critique.”