Looking at the new body of work Danica Lundy painted for her long overdue NYC solo debut and thinking of all the times we've used the term "introspection" or "self reveal" it is hard not to feel at least a bit silly. Because while other artists might be using metaphors, symbols, and other ways to examine themselves and reveal their secrets, it feels that no other body of work we've seen in a long time gives these terms a more honest, real, and literal meaning.
Three Hole Punch, which opens on March 5th at Magenta Plains in NYC is continuing Lundy's exploration of scenes from adolescent memory, literally dissected into something that can be described as 90s teen films from the science-obsessed, high-tech future. Depicting stereotypical and highly relatable moments that include classroom, parking lot, football field, or party scenes, the Canadian-born and New Haven-based artist is capable of constructing unseen, sci-fi-like angles of these experiences. With a rich repertoire of confident and utterly effective paint manipulation techniques she is taking a jumble of surfaces and textures, interlocks them with different views, angles, and perspectives, into a seemingly unsolved Rubik's-cube of visuals that somehow, in the end, make all the sense. This is how puking at the party with a friend taking care of you, nervously chewing on the pencil in the classroom while getting judgemental looks of your classmates, hiding in your hoodie during sport practice, or undergoing a PCR procedure become an outlet to revive some carefully buried emotions. Melding the figural and the mechanical, or better anatomical and technical, such a unique vision of de-romanticised teen years is punching the viewer with a raw, sometimes gruesome, but undeniably factual reality.
"I want to make a painting that acts on the viewer like a slow-release pill," Lundy mentioned in the interview we did for our Winter 2020 issue, and we've never imagined we would get the front seat alongside the pill. While offering an exciting of different views at the location in her previous works, the new paintings seem to be revolving around the human body as the epicenter of what's happening. Engineering the impossible views through bones and insides into a cinematic or theatrical setting, she "makes an explicit connection between emotional uncertainty and bodily discomfort." Binding together a documentation of feelings, depictions of factual and fantasised realities, as well as unpopular factualities, Lundy's paintings are transformed into a three hole punch that organizes and archives confusing memories which form and determine our adult selves. And after receiving these preview images, we've moved closer to the edge of our seats, have our popcorn and drinks installed, and are beyond ready for the rest of the action! - Sasha Bogojev
All images courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels. Photography by Shark Senesac.
