‘I need to carry anxiousness to the floor’: Shannon Cartier Lucy on her unsettling works

‘My artistic course of at all times entails taking kind of acquainted photographs and rearranging them to create a disruption,’ says Nashville-based artist Shannon Cartier Lucy. ‘I need to carry anxiousness to the floor. This generally is a risk to our ego and might make us really feel susceptible.’

It’s an unsettling emotion delivered to the forefront at Lucy’s present exhibition at London’s Tender Opening gallery, which imbues quotidian photographs of childhood with an electrical cost. In Lucy’s work, nostalgic symbols – pencils, straws, pasta necklace – are reframed, turning into play issues for adults in a stark confrontation of the childhood reminiscences we repress. The outcomes will be discomfiting.

‘Tapping into this irreducible anxiousness is a type of un-homing, which is a important idea that describes the expertise of being displaced from our sense of safety and “residence.”,’ Lucy provides. ‘I’m keen on making a “new residence,” so to talk. My ritual in conjuring up these photographs and uncomfortable emotions to the floor and sharing them with others is a option to maybe neutralize the anxiousness. It’s like a prayer, nearly.’

Lucy attracts on cinematic framing methods to up the psychological pressure, together with her tight crops forcing a detailed examination of her topic. However regardless of the readability an apparently straight illustration, Lucy’s storytelling is stuffed with ambiguities

‘We have a tendency to position an omnipotence in understanding issues, and making sense of issues. We’re conditioned to attempt to keep in management as a result of we assume it should preserve us secure. To have the ability to manage and grasp the world offers us consolation. So going through ambiguity is an inherently traumatic expertise. I hope that making these work can shift round my very own expertise with uncertainty and make that relatable and communicable.’