Shannon Cartier Lucy. Home is a crossword puzzle I can’t solve

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They thrust you towards the edge of a precipice right where your inhibitions end and your subconscious begins. Suddenly, you find yourself in the entrails of a complex labyrinth where the walls are moving, reconfiguring the very space you’re walking through. Each painting is a clue in a grander narrative arc, but there is neither a linear sequence to the story, nor is there a plot. Only a feeling of uprootedness. Are you looking inside someone else’s mind or your own?

The scene is set in the moments preceding your awaking. You are knee-deep in a lucid dream. Your subconscious is soliloquizing. The hushed tones and the mostly desaturated color palette render the surroundings slightly lugubrious. You have the power to wake up, but you opt to stay in this parallel universe.

In the kitchen, goldfish are swimming in their bowl on an open stove flame, but the water has yet to boil. A woman sleeps under a large plastic wrap covering most of the objects in the room. You can’t see enough of her face to ID her. Does it even matter? Another woman —or maybe it’s the same one— is carrying swans in a plastic bag as though idly coming back from an errand run. Elsewhere, books scattered pell-mell on a library floor between two fully stacked shelves form a colorful pathway to closed doors. Another woman is lounging on a couch absorbed by her copy of Sex After Death.

The work exists in a liminal space toeing the line between eerie and hilarious. Lucy is summoning the subconscious mind to the forefront. In doing so, she reconfigures the world into an unsolvable Rubik’s cube.

—Lara Atallah, January 2020