Lucy Copper
To Render What We Owe
Communication is about giving and receiving. What is difficult to understand?
- May 4 - 25, 2023
- Opening: Thursday, May 4, 6:00 — 8:00pm
Lucy Copper’s To Render What We Owe draws from the tradition of narrative painting and borrows everyday images as source material–a blue sky, an ad, a trail cam still. These chosen moments are anecdotal, and we witness hints or suggestions of a more complete story in their details: failures of communication, lack of understanding, or points when an agreement is made or broken. Each artwork represents a conversation, or an argument, depending on the viewer’s perception.
However, clear answers fail to emerge. Tension and illusion permeate. This incoherence is amplified by an uneasy relationship between surface and substrate, figure and ground. Window shades, cardboard, and artificial grass stand in for canvas and interrupt the imagery. What are the subtexts embedded in these materials and scenes? Copper leaves her visual language open to interpretation.
About the Artist
Lucy Copper is an artist from Delaware who received her MFA from the University of Washington in 2019. She has exhibited in the US and internationally, and she splits her time between Seattle and Malmö, Sweden.