DANICA LUNDY: BOOMBOX
White Cube announces Boombox by Danica Lundy. In her second exhibition with the gallery, the artist explores structures of power and how these inform and determine the fabric of the everyday.
May 15 - June 29, 2024
Often listening to music while she works, Lundy describes how ‘music logic’ underpins the rhythmic orchestration of the image, while also providing the point of departure for the exhibition as a whole. ‘A dozen songs (or paintings) made to fit and flow together can do something really dimensional and intangible’, she explains.
Lundy brings the smaller narrative moments of her paintings into sharp focus using techniques of cropping, flattening or magnification. Such examples include a beer can with its ring lifted and ready to be opened, a straw primed to pierce the lid of a cup, and a coin half-fed into the slot of a vending machine. Suspended in animation, visual incidents in Lundy’s images are atemporal.
The subject of the painting Yank (2024) suggests a biopolitical examination, where bodily agency is subject to social, medical or infrastructural power. Depicting an IUD removal, the female body seen in Yank appears to morph into a cavernous void. Lundy’s near fisheye perspective sees ovaries enlarged to the size of footballs and pelvic bones contorted into the faces of two masked doctors.
In Lundy’s work, autobiography yields to larger themes through narratives that address the theatre of human experience. As suggested by the exhibition’s title, ‘Boombox’, the paintings locate themselves at the ‘border between what’s inside and what’s outside’. The threshold of the body (or the machine) serves as structural framework, albeit one that is porous and penetrable, beyond which the external world inundates with a cacophony of sounds, sights and smells.
As writer and art critic Justin Paton describes: ‘Lundy deploys the wet language of oil paint to get at the content (and discontent) she’s chasing. In her hands, painting is an audaciously refreshed technology for seeing into the world – a way of peeling back the skin of rooms, cars and bodies and fearlessly pushing in’.
Danica Lundy (b.1991, Salt Spring, Canada) lives and works in Connecticut. She received her BFA from Mount Allison University, Sackville, and completed her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, where she concentrated on painting and was awarded the Leipzig International Art Programme Residency and the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship. A three-time Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant recipient, Lundy has exhibited internationally, with solo shows in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her work is in the public collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Sydney Modern Project, New South Wales; Hall Art Foundation; Green Family Art Foundation; Centre of International Contemporary Art Vancouver; and Contemporary Art Foundation, Japan.