Christiane Lyons

Anna Meliksetian and Michael Briggs are pleased to present A Good Line: Can’t Live Without You, Christiane Lyons’ second solo show at the gallery.

Lyons’ practice is driven by an ongoing investigation into the process of painting and the use of appropriated material to recontexualize images and provoke new meanings and visual intepretations. The works in A Good Line: Can’t Live Without You are the result of manipulating found imagery by drawing upon the foundational, primary elements of painting.

The paintings in Lyons’ last exhibition, What Goes Around Comes Around, drew upon the notion of the Rorschach inkblot as their primary compositional device, an image of bilateral symmetry, and its use continues in the current exhibition. This bilateral split offers an opportunity to combine normally unrelated source imagery by means of common colors and shapes, as well as less obvious commonalities, such as abstract notions of symmetry especially in relation to time and historical context.

Often Lyons’ sources are taken from the art historical canon, reflecting her interest the production of art and the historical and social context in which art works were produced, along with their resonance in the contemporary world.

A Good Line: Can’t Live Without You is comprised of nine works, three different paintings followed by the repetition of each painting three times; one is the original, one is its inverse, or difference, and one is primary-color or black-and-white based. Lyons uses repetition as a tool to further abstract qualities when the paintings are viewed as a group, in addition to the abstract qualities created by the use of Rorschach’s bilateral symmetry. Lyons confidently breaks down and reassembles colors and forms, patterns and structures and blurs the lines between abstraction and representation. Not only is Lyons concerned with paintings theoretical history, but also its technical history as well, posing questions about current image making and representation in general.

A Good Line: Can't Live Without You

April 19 – May 31, 2014

Press Release