Shannon Cartier Lucy: Rubedo

A show of new paintings, Shannon Cartier Lucy’s exhibition “Rubedo” is the artist’s first solo show at Night Gallery. Titled for the Latin word meaning “redness,” Lucy has selected the word for its history stretching far beyond the literal translation—after being used by alchemists to describe the color’s metamorphic capacity, the term was coined by Carl Jung as a descriptor for the point of psychological development in which one has come to the actualization of their “true self”. Marking a period of death and rebirth, the paintings making up the artist’s idea of “Rubedo” are intimate, beautiful, tense, and transformational compositions where the presence of the color red is at once subtle and omnipresent, even when there isn’t any red to be found. Evoking empowerment and self-examination through unusual and uncanny circumstances, viewers will find imagery like a close-cropped depiction of hands holding flames; a woman undressing nonchalantly with a flaming skirt; and a girl being fed sanguine bunches of goji berries from a mysterious ensemble of hands.