Gallery Two, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Wy in which she will debut Volume 1 of AUTODESIRE, a graphic novel machine made of process-based drawings —a body without organs— assembled through capacious rhythms. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The show opens on Saturday the 18th of September, from 11am to 5pm.
AUTODESIRE is a saga: a collection of 232 drawings that work together as a new manifesto on the darker iteration of figural abstraction. At the start of the pandemic, Wy found herself locked out of the studio and attempted a new format of working to meet the chaotic anxiety of the moment. Working serially and automatically in a format inspired by Louise Bourgeois’s Insomnia drawings; AUTODESIRE drawings become a vessel or a place or a setting, the hedge garden, a place for one to get lost.
AUTODESIRE is the story of a heroine who is making a journey through a road trip inferno, and her story is told through an algorithm that is extracting the memories from her long-dead corpse. AUTODESIRE drawings are made layering ultra-saturated oil crayons on rich pigment-dyed folding panels; where forms continually refuse to settle and instead embrace multiplicity, alien sexuality, and Dionysian logic. AUTODESIRE is made entirely of fragment narratives that come in and out of resolution through formal entanglement with abstraction; narratives both real and imagined, stolen and autobiographical. AUTODESIRE is the multiplicity of self as voiced by the alien femme in the bacchanal at the end of the world.
Each drawing in the series is displayed on two small handmade wood panels, these panels are hinged to open flat for display on the wall or may close shut like a book to be hidden on a bookshelf. The outside of each book/diptych is flat white and minimal and the inside opens to reveal the drawing. The inspiration for this finishing is from “devotional” images from the early modern period: small wooden hinged panels, filled with images of Christs and Madonnas, made to be carried.
Lauren Wy’s work was most recently shown in the Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial in Chicago IL; ANTI, the 6th Athens Biennale in Greece; Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, and at Apparatus Projects and Practise Gallery, both in Chicago and this fall will be included in _Espressioni at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy. Concurrent with her show here at Western Exhibitions, Wy will be showing Volume 2 of AUTODESIRE in a solo show at Dio Horia in Greece. Wy received her MFA from Northwestern University in 2020 and she lives and works in Los Angeles.
Visit the In Depth with… Lauren Wy page here.
Read a review of the exhibition by Annette LePique in Sixty Inches from Center here.