Theodore:Art presents Juliette Losq ‘Lucaria’

October 20 – December 1, 2012

Opening reception: Saturday October 20, 6-9 pm

Gallery hours Friday-Sunday 1-6 pm

Theodore:Art presents Juliette Losq Lucaria.  This will be Losq’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first solo exhibition in the United States.

Daily experience is littered with the detritus of an almost forgotten past – the abandoned yet vaguely familiar structures that form transitory sites throughout our cities and towns.

Losq associates these spaces with the anthropological notion of ‘The Clearing’ (Lucus) – where we feel at our most safe and yet our most vulnerable: stray too close to the edge and the forest may snatch a careless wanderer into its depths.  Generally shunned by city-dwellers, these gloomy regions offer haven to the darkly mythological creatures associated with the more animalistic aspects of human behaviour, marginal in the minds of all but ‘outsiders’.  This territory is occupied by children — carved out into dens marked by graffiti tags, or used as places to urinate or copulate.  In the daylight of popular culture these ‘symbolic recesses’ shelter monsters of delinquency and dereliction.

Losq posits that the modern observer maps a fictive history on to such locations: an imagined past life of places and their inhabitants, subconsciously influenced by written and visual media.  Victorian prints, rocaille compositions and daguerreotypes, among other sources, are integrated with her own documentation of neglected landscapes on which the viewer has the potential to project their imagination.  Literal and metaphorical collages are transformed into composite drawn scenes.

Myriorama, for example, is based a popular Victorian children’s toy.  Cards, on which a number of scenes were printed, could be laid out in a variety of combinations to make a coherent whole, presenting the imaginative possibility of an endless landscape.  Each panel of this tripartite drawing can be interchanged and the composition will still read as a plausible landscape.

Juliette Losq (b.1978 UK) received degrees in English Literature and History of Art at Newnham College, Cambridge (BA 2000), History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA 2001), Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art (BA 2007), and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art (2010) at the Royal Academy Schools, London.  Losq won the Jerwood drawing prize in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Catlin Art Prize 2011.  Losq’s installation Wunderkammer was acquired by the Saatchi Collection, and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition The Power of Paper at the Saatchi Gallery.