New Image Art is pleased to present the West Coast debut of Kat Lyons inaugural solo exhibition, Memory of a Monolith, opening Saturday, September 14th, 2019 from 7-10 PM. As her first solo exhibition Lyon’s builds a body of work that reimagines a world free from human dominance, where coevolution is an act of preservation and salvation.
Memory Of A Monolith
the planet is a monolith with eyes heavy enough to fall back inside themselves
they see us clearly as salty saccharine washes over the clean shape of them
a monument erected, a memory with retreating limbs
i walk around to see all sides
vivid, curved, aged by exhaustion
the planet is a monolith erected for itself
the ground an old sponge
the sky a blackened grip
eyes heavy enough for rain
they look inside themselves, then back at us
-Katherine Lyons
Memory of a Monolith refers to the current state of the planet's distress. Much like our planet, a monolith signifies strength and wisdom that can only be learned through age. They at times feel defenseless in the battle against human sovereignty, acting to us, as a seemingly stagnant onlookers~ with bestowed sentience through the gift of memory. Lyon’s investigates the planet and our current ecological state in the above through this lens.
Expressing the imagined through the contours of our anthropocene world, Lyon’s combines the depictions of our non-human companions with object storytelling. Her somber pallet and luminescent hued imagery of sentient creatures emits a dark and surreal ambiance illustrating the tension between the animals’ imperceptible etymology and mankind’s ecological dominance. The subjects exist in moments of transcendence, performance, mutation, fear or celebration, always under the watchful eye of human consumption.
The work is, at times, a celebration in looking toward our non-human companions and what they can tell us about betterment and belonging. What can interspecies education teach about what our future has to offer or what we could offer it? What if our icons were the non-human earthlings who have much to teach us? Lyon’s hopes to join in the conversations that bring the nonhuman world into our sphere of moral concern and recognize their lives as integral parts of a codependent and incredibly entangled web of earthly livelihood. Building reverence for the worlds we have culturally deemed unworthy and finding empathy along the way.
