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Library Resource Guide for THE IN-BETWEEN: An Exhibition by Laura Lewis: Getting Started

Artist information and suggested readings

Laura Lewis

Laura Lewis is a queer visual artist originally from Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia) currently based in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada). Her conceptual figurative painting practice explores philosophical questions concerning psychosexuality, the multiplicities of self, and nuances of the human condition. 

 

Lewis graduated in 2018 with a combined degree from NSCAD and the School of Art, University of Manitoba BFA Honours program. She is the founder and facilitator of Critical Painting Perspectives, presented by Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA). She has participated in artist residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, and in Civita Castellana, Italy. She was featured in the 2023 Painting issue of Border Crossings Magazine (interview by Robert Enright). In 2024 her work was exhibited at various institutions across Canada including Modern Fuel, MAWA, aceartinc. and Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg.

 

Artist's Statement

I investigate the intricacies of flesh through paint. I am interested in the fluctuation of bodies, the expansion and contraction of skin, and the oscillation of identity through a queer lens. I research themes of psychosomatic conflict, vulnerability, the multiplicities of self, and the nuances of the human condition.

I explore abstraction by virtue of scale: Bold brushwork and gestural marking-making appears in folds of flesh, cellulite, and skin. Painted bodies oscillate between abstracted forms of colour: progression and fluctuation are inherent qualities of queer existence, as it is ever-changing and developing. The construction of the brushwork acts as a metaphor of the subconscious mind: layers of loose mark-making deliberately placed with precision and rigour function as components of an individual's psyche, collectively uniting over time to create a fully realized figure, or persona.

I am interested in visually representing enigmatic dualities: the dichotomy that exists between bliss and anguish or desire and disgust. The figures in my work exist in an ambiguous, in-between space. Lustrous movement frozen in time perpetuates a sense of the uncanny. Multiples of the same individual in different conditions of being signifies an uncanny double, or doppelgänger. Something commonplace seen in a way that is suddenly strange: a face forming from another. Like the self, but threateningly other…What is familiar is rendered unfamiliar.

There is a slippage that transpires in painting. A place that exists somewhere in the middle of reality and illusion. Between gestural brushstrokes and enigmatic backgrounds. It is visible yet physically indefinable, intangible. My work aims to capture the indiscernible quality that oscillates between figuration and abstraction. As a pansexual woman, I sometimes feel that I myself exist in a state of oscillation. My work conveys a pensive existence, a realm of the unconscious, a state of figurative fluctuation, flesh in oscillation.

Suggested readings


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