Lucy Charlesworth Freeman "Pages From A Book"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Pages from a Book
April 20 - June 4 , 2023
The works in "Pages from a Book," Lucy Charlesworth Freeman's debut New York solo show, amount to an auspicious first exhibition from a new bold voice, an artist flexing an idiom all her own. Fusing her studies in psychiatry and medicine with her deep faith to create a studio practice that was in some ways destined, there's a vision in Lucy Charlesworth Freeman's works that can be shocking, a vocabulary that will at first seem foreign, a manic energy unleashed. They burn hard and take no prisoners and wear their emotions on their sleeves. And they transcend. These digital drawings printed on matte-stuffed with biological diagramming, literary bravura, spiritual yearning, and a uniquely derived arithmetic to add it all up are the first glimpses into a larger project that will, according to the artist, act as a mapping-out of the contours of the soul.
Each work is the product of an extensive world-building, a tracking of the divine spark in an equation, the search for the furies within bodies that contain the spark of the transcendental. The path to get there is not easy. In How to be Guided, maroon orbs are assaulted by phlegmatic viruses of words, enmeshed in a backness and oceans of text. The parentheticals and bisected ovals of Challenges to Directing One's Life Course could be isomorphic mathematics or Germanic runes or weather formations. A series of three white works amounts to a stirring suite in which the path to redemption could seem as simple as following directions, except it's absolutely not.
It's a jarring opening salvo, taking on the almighty s o directly. But Freeman comes at it from the place of a convert. While undergoing the process of an awakening at a new church, with a new faith, the artist found herself struggling to explain the matters of the heart using simply words. And she was processing the death of her mother, the Pictures Generation artist Sarah Charlesworth, and trying to divine the things that she never said, the artworks never made, the lessons never imparted.
She channeled everything into a series of digital drawings, working both in Manhattan and at a space rented in an industrial corner of Newburgh, New York. Having grown up in her mother's studio, she built her practice in the same manner, honoring Sarah Charlesworth's monkish devotion to the commodification of the object, the altar the object is placed upon. But the work also reflected the artist's desire, during her mom's lifetime, to opt out of studio life and go into the sciences. For these works she draws heavily from the aesthetic of the textbook, drowning the objects in blocks of words meant not to be read but absorbed, washed over.
Dive into Pleura and the self-contained universe overwhelms you, the drawn figures functioning as something between jellyfish and sine waves, or amoebas and line graphs. Text tumbles through Heart's Defense like a viscous blood drip. But as the words divorce from each other and lose their assigned meaning, the deeper non-linear narrative emerges, a narrative that mirrors the artist's journey to the places that answer the questions beckoning from the void.
Installation
Works
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Doubling, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" x 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Quality of Soul, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" × 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Challenges to Directing One's Life Course, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" × 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Varying Soul Girths and Flame Breaths, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" x 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Rooting for the Squirrels, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" x 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
How to be Guided, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" x 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Hearts Defense, 2021
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" × 18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Pleura, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" ×18"
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman
Abundance, 2023
Digital drawing printed heavy matte paper, wood lacquered frame
22" × 18"