KARYN LYONS

With a fondness for the exciting and disturbing emotional currents that charge adolescence, The End of the Night, acts as a remembrance, or even a goodbye to those unbridled moments of girlhood. Smouldering and pining, Lyons weaves fantasy with the autobiographical to compose imaginative scenes of those complicated, not-yet-tamed between-times of exploration and discovery.

These intimately-scaled paintings, oils on linen, interspersed with works on vellum, draw viewers into an emotionally resonant and personally moving world. In The Dominion of Night, a girl can be seen standing in a glowing house at nighttime, above this scene is a striking daytime sky—a surprising and extraordinary collision and homage to surrealist René Magritte. Across the works, her subjects are discovering their own dominion over body and mind, caught mid-embrace, sneaking a cigarette, or sitting in her bedroom longing for love, new (adult) possibilities are out there. Not entirely alone, Lyons’ subjects are occasionally accompanied by a watchful cat, itself a symbol of mischievousness, femininity, and assurance.

Little time markers such as a David Bowie poster hanging on the wall and even the title to the exhibition (taken from a B-side by The Doors), turn back the hourglass to a pre internet era escapism. Lyons’ filmic compositions recall those luscious days when all you could do was sit by the phone and hope you didn’t miss the call. Meanwhile you pass the time listening to records; the mind wanders, putting on plays on the enchanting stage of your imagination. Mysterious and romantic—these pictures are exorcisms of desire, brightly painted and strikingly transposed in a minor key.

Karyn Lyons (b. New Haven, CT) received a BA in Journalism from the American University in Washington, D.C.. She did post-graduate studies at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles/New York; Timothy Taylor, New York, NY; TURN Gallery, New York, NY; Stems, Paris/Brussels; Carl Kostyál, Milan; and Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA; among others. Lyons lives and works in New York City, NY.