Shannon Cartier Lucy

Shannon Cartier Lucy describes her oil paintings as portraying ‘situations’; a fishbowl on a flaming stove, a woman playing basketball in bed, a Dalmatian mid-autopsy. Despite their setting within the familiar familial home, compositions complete with soft furnishings and characters adorned in crumpled nightdresses, Cartier Lucy’s paintings are nightmarish and uncanny. Growing up with a schizophrenic parent, Cartier Lucy relates that it was not uncommon to find a ‘toaster in the freezer or The Holy Bible in the dishwasher’. Through their absurdist, darkly humorous scenography, the works symbolise domestic disorder and discontent. Like in a bad dream, faces are often obscured, and figures rendered anonymous, and so the viewer projects characters from their own imagination into the empty space. The scenes are always captured at the precipice, perhaps in seconds before the dreamer awakens with a start. ...

Founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, Soft Opening presents UK-based and international emerging contemporary artists, and often their first solo presentations in London. Focusing on work pushing the conventional limits of medium or material, the gallery presents a wide range of media and practices. Soft Opening built its early program with projects that responded to the gallery’s unique first location in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Opening a second space in East London in 2019 saw programming strategy develop as Soft Opening began participating in international art fairs and representing artists. Programming is now focused at this East London space. In 2020 the gallery began publishing artist monographs - the first was with Tenant of Culture in 2020 followed by Gina Fischli in 2021 and Sin Wai Kin in 2022. ...