Larissa Lockshin: Elephant Heart

Y2K group is pleased to present Larissa Lockshin’s second solo exhibition in New York.


“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In “Elephant Heart”, Lockshin activates the gallery in an all-over plum colored installation featuring: a miniature interior scene, paintings from her recent dancers series, a clay bust with dried flowers and rose petals on the floor, and a framed work on paper depicting spectators.

In Lockshin’s solo exhibition, she creates an interior setting filled with warm-hued paintings of dancers akin and borrowed heavily from Edgar Degas’ depictions. The large paintings shows dancers performing in the foreground with only their legs visible and others watching and waiting during the performance. The smaller painting shows the orchestral group playing and towards the top of the painting is of ballerina legs; either dancing, waiting, or viewing. The bust of the dancer is shown on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery with her eyes closed meditating. In front of her is a display of a tiny interior room or bedroom with furniture on a shelf with miniature paintings on the wall installed salon style. The framed work on paper shows a solemn audience either listening carefully or sitting apathetically and waiting. The last work is a framed piece of satin with hearts, roses, and abstract markings in a glass frame.

The dancer’s compositions are a symbol/figure in classical and modern art; similar to bathers, fruit still lifes, or horse paintings. The gestural and material similarities in the paintings are related aesthetically through abstraction, pattern, and figuration by portraying beauty and attempting to generate or recreate it. The dancers also represent the expectation of suffering for beauty, or even the artist suffering for their art.

The satin work is unprimed and relies on the balance of gestures and markings to reveal the ground/ negative space. The gestures themselves are often compared to elements of landscape through color and form; precise or intentional representation is not present. The gestures seem to reference musical notation, and the movement visible through the abstract gestures mimics the motion of the dancers.

In the installation, the entire room is altered to create a sense of a cohesive interior space. A miniature scene of a bedroom on a shelf comprised of tiny furniture creates a world within a world. The works with both performers and spectators create an emphasis on the power dynamic, in art and in life, displaying the amount of suffering a spectator will ignore for their entertainment. A joyful subject matter can also be viewed as voyeuristic.

Larissa Lockshin is a Canadian-born artist based in Queens, New York. Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Odette, Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR (2019), Bad Dream House, American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, Tucson, AZ (2018); Far Side of the Valley, Albert Baronian, Brussels (2015); Bone Dry, 3434, New York (2016); Close But Not Cigar, Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Scarecrow Show, The Green Thumb, Watermill, NY (2019); Metal Meadow, Camp Eternal Hell Chamber, Cobleskill, NY (2019); Exit Soul, Liberal Arts Roxbury, Roxbury, NY (2018); Moondog, East Hampton Shed, New York. This is her first time showing with Y2K group.