Project Description
Monica Lundy, Natalina (Santa Maria della Pietà, Rome), 2021, mixed media with liquid porcelain on panel, 28 x 35 inches
EXHIBITION DATES
March 29 to May 13, 2023
NANCY TOOMEY FINE ART
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Monica Lundy titled Asylumscapes: Studies on Sites of Memory, on view from March 29 to May 13, 2023. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.
The public is invited to meet artist Monica Lundy to celebrate the release of her book Monica Lundy on Saturday, April 1, 3:30pm to 5pm, in the lounge inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, and at the opening of the artist’s exhibition from 5pm to 7pm upstairs at Nancy Toomey Fine Art gallery.
Monica Lundy, Façade of Pavilion IV with Cat (Santa Maria della Pietà, Rome), 2023, mixed media with liquid porcelain on panel in wooden frame, 34.375 x 30.5 x 3 inches
Essay by Giuliana Benassi, contemporary art curator and professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma
What is the meaning of the word scape? It is the view or scene of something. Asylumscapes therefore describes a precise scenario, that of the place of the asylum as seen by the artist herself. The place in question is the former asylum in Rome, Santa Maria della Pietà, a place traversed by Monica Lundy in different directions. In the past, the artist has made works starting from archival images, site visits, and later she made burned drawings of objects belonging to that place. For this exhibition, however, Lundy, not at all tired of looking at the place once again to probe the pulse of memory to its depths, embraces it with paint, as if she were treating a landscape. Yes, a landscape, precisely one of the topos of painting.
Monica Lundy, The Pine Grove (Santa Maria della Pietà, Rome), 2023
Mixed media with liquid porcelain on panel in wooden frame
25.625 x 36.8 x 3.5 inches
Again returning to the suffix scape therefore reminds us of a wide look into space. Metaphorically, Lundy’s means a wide look into history and memory: through the places that still have a reminder of past nightmares, hidden events that, faintly, allow themselves to be described through visible traces and signs.
Monica Lundy, Study of Emerald Wall (Santa Maria della Pietà, Rome), 2023, gouache and charcoal on linen in wooden frame, 43.5 x 34.875 x 3.375 inches
Glimpses of abandoned interiors, characterized by empty horrors of cardboard boxes or by the loneliness of a chair or a radiator, as well as the view of a pavilion among a grove of trees and the portrait of a ruined building: these are some of the subjects that Lundy paints as a statement. “These are places of memory, the landscape of memory,” says Lundy. Beautiful or insignificant, bleak or fascinating, they represent a thousand portraits of as many human beings. They are studies, images where the artist’s eye seeks new units to measure what perhaps cannot be measured: memory and especially everything that escapes from memory.
Monica Lundy, Angela (Santa Maria della Pietà, Rome), 2021, mixed media with liquid porcelain on panel in wooden frame, 29 x 37 x 2 inches
Thus, liquid porcelain on board or charcoal on linen are the mediums Lundy prefers for this series of works as tools to crystallize what is otherwise elusive. The difference in technique, however, is brought to the same formal regime by a single gesture unique to all the works in the series, namely the frame. The frame is not simply a frame, but an integral part of the work. Handcrafted with traditional Roman techniques, it is conceived by the artist as a “stage” in which the images are exhibited once and for all, as if to be fixed forever in memory, in a kind of monitor sculpted to project the same image indefinitely.
-Giuliana Benassi
Monica Lundy, Estratto Fluido di Arancio Amaro (Fluid Extract of Bitter Orange) from the Hospital Pharmacy of Santa Maria della Pietà, 2019, burned drawing on Fabriano paper, 12 x 10 inches (framed)
Monica Lundy, photo by Daniele Puppi Lundy
Italian-American artist Monica Lundy was born in Portland, Oregon (1974) and raised between the United States and Saudi Arabia. She holds a BFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in painting from Mills College, where she worked closely with the Chinese-American artist Hung Liu (1948-2021). Lundy’s lavish mixed-media paintings and installations are based on extensive research conducted in archives, museums and libraries around the world. Her subjects include historically marginalized populations whose struggles are long forgotten. By unearthing the narratives of these people and places, she gives new voice to their plights, that we today might learn from the trials they endured. Her painting technique incorporates non-traditional media such as clay, rusted metal, liquid porcelain, and burned paper, catching viewers off-guard with a sensibility is simultaneously gritty and luxuriant. Lundy’s site-specific installations have been mounted in unusual venues such as Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Mint, Golden Gate State Park in San Francisco and Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome (a decommissioned “insane asylum”). She is the subject of a recently published monograph featuring texts by four distinguished authors, with a lead essay by Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). Lundy currently lives and works in Rome and Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy.
Asylumscapes: Studies on Sites of Memory is Monica Lundy’s second solo show with Nancy Toomey in San Francisco.
