Monica Lundy at Mills College

There is a lot of interesting and experimental student art being shown this month as the MFA candidates prepare to leave art school and venture forth into the "real" world. Given the realities of the art world these days, I suspect that most of the students are already more than aware of the "real art world" and the challenges that they will face.

Since I do look at so much art work, sometimes it's all a blur of conceptual/ installation/video/ media pieces that are (sometimes) intellectually interesting but not emotionally engaging. That's why I found Ms. Lundy's work so unique and stunning. It's not only technically accomplished but her portraits of inmates in old California mental asylums and prisons exerts a powerful pull that is part compassion, part revulsion. I wanted to know about these people from the past - they spoke to me of forgotten tragedies, buried beneath layers of race, class, and gender.

From her artist's statement:
I am attracted to obscure California histories. For this body of work, I conducted research at the California State Archives in Sacramento, combing through historic documents and archival photographs. As a result, the parallel ideas of “inmates” and the “asylum” have emerged in the forms of oil and gouache portraits of female inmates and the application of wet clay to the gallery wall. ....Together, these works frame the question of how individuals are classified and placed within the penal system. They also exhibit my curiosity about what constitutes a criminal or an insane person, especially when that person is a woman. As I reflected upon these sordid layers of our cultural history, I wondered about the individual stories that have been erased in time, leaving only mug shots and stains on the asylum walls. Perhaps this is why I enjoy working with materials that impede my ability to “control” the outcome: diluted paint that pools, bleeds, and separates as it dries, creating the effect of staining or erosion; or wet clay on the wall that leaves as evidence only a trace of what was there before. Working in this way not only conjures mental parallels to the corrosive nature of time on material things – such as evidence – and on memory, but it also allows me to reflect upon how the “asylum” has a degenerating effect upon the “inmate”. "

http://www.monicalundy.com