Danica Lundy paints like she’s omniscient, like she can see in multiple dimensions. Her images are full of everything. She takes you inside someone’s chest, through electrical fittings, sends you traversing through the guts of machines and bodies. Time, space, density, memory, love, lust, all can be burst open in her grubby psychedelia.
The first painting here shows a fragile, premature baby in an incubator, the artist’s own. A pair of arms reaching in to treat it have been bisected at the elbows; now you, the viewer, are in the scene, caring, healing, in this world of gore and fragility.
Then your view shifts to within the mouth of a high school athlete, gulping down water as your teammates stretch around you. Everywhere in these worlds you see exposed rib cages and viscera, you see out from inside machines, or behind a mirror as high schoolers kiss. It’s all rendered in filthy, thick pinks and purples, but with these little goops of clarity and trompe l’oeil precision, with all these endlessly repeating symbols of chewed apples and Umbro logos. It’s very good painting.
The gallery wall texts blather on about power structures and consumerism, but it’s hard to see how that relates. Instead, this feels diaristic and personal, like Lundy is documenting both the most mundane and the rawest, most intense moments of her life–- teenage loves, childbirth, deaths, diners, sports, workplaces – but going so far that she tears it to shreds, exposes too much. It’s as if by ripping the whole world up and laying out for you to see, Lundy just might finally make sense of the mess of living.
