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The Art World in Focus
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Expo Chicago

EXPO CHICAGO

Wilding Cran Gallery
Booth 230 11–14 April 2024 Chicago
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Press Release

Working primarily with oil paint, Lemay produces circular canvases which pull the viewer into portalsof memory, rendering tactility and permanence to the transitory nature of environments inhabitedthroughout her childhood. The subjects of her paintings reflect early experiences with addiction,violence, and erasure, alongside intersections of race, gender, and ancestry. Through this series ofpaintings, Lemay communicates a reverence for the past, while directing her practice towards thefuture. The textural gestures of the artist’s brush (at times integrated with acrylic, graphite, marker,and charcoal) bring out shadows and highlights that allow us to distinguish fragments, which serve tohighlight the relationship between Lemay’s human figures and the dense, abstract, uncertain spacesof emotion that they inhabit.

Alongside her series of works on canvas, Lemay continues to explore soapstone carving throughouther practice — a uniquely fragile material with traditional ties to various West African and Indigenouscultures. Through stacking miniature stone renderings of chairs, sofas, and rocking horses, the artistreconfigures the spaces of her childhood through object association. The precarious physicality ofeach stone sculpture, alongside the labor-intensive method of their assembly, emphasises Lemay’sunsettled feelings of both metaphorical and literal dispossession.

Through the cultivation of fragmented memories, Natia Lemay harnesses her interdisciplinarypractice to produce a visual iconography that grants tactility to an emotional underworld of cyclicaldisplacement and loss, unveiling the tensions and ties between ownership and identity.

Press release courtesy Wilding Cran Gallery

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