Cx72 Featured Artist: Kat Lyons
Kat Lyons
"Comfort-thing"
June 1, 2018 - June 10, 2018
Valet Gallery
509 E. Franklin Street
Richmond, VA
Awkward in their performance—existing somewhere among the mundane, beautiful, humorous, and disturbing—the subjects of “Comfort-thing” speak to the unresolved unease with which women often navigate life. They oscillate between begrudged participation, complacency, and a celebratory autonomy. Subject to the gaze of the spectator, both covert and often male gendered, their physical and situational limitations are revealed.
The artist is interested in how the gaze of this spectator determines a familiar predicament of confinement, detailed in issues of the personified animal; objectified female figure;
or anthropomorphized object: themes embedded in both portraiture as well as comics. The subjects of her paintings merge the beautiful and grotesque to celebrate these seemingly contradictory motifs. She explores her place in the female experience through personal narrative, enacted by the subjects of her paintings. They reveal themselves through the lens of performance, vanity, eroticism, and spectatorship.
Kat Lyons (b. 1991, Louisville, KY) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated form Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking.
*
www.katharinelyons.com