Monya Rowe Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Lacey Black titled Cosmic Zoo. Black’s paintings are centered around a spiritual practice of going into the unknown, and searching for the unnamed connections within all living beings. Personal, fictitious and historical imagery are incorporated into works that are rooted in figuration, but explore lyricism, abstraction and surrealism. Black says: “I include a lot of different people, animals and things in my paintings, from different moments in time, and also unnamed things, more abstract forms. In Taoist and Buddhist writings, they call this "the ten thousand things" which represents all the material diversity of the universe.”
In Mother of Pearl, Cremation Ground Meditation /Indra’s Net (2025), the central figure, an elongated commanding angel, is immersed within a metaphorical net. The net creates a sacred ground, and alludes to a cosmic net that covers the entire universe, a Hindu and Buddhist Cosmology that describes interconnectedness and interdependence. As in most of Black’s works, the components are laden with symbolic importance. A red ribbon at the top of the net is connected to a tree and hence the earth. Lady bugs, present throughout the painting, have been known as a symbol of protection since the middle ages, when they devoured insects. Symbolism is used to enrich narratives and add layers of meaning thereby inviting the viewer to make connections beyond the literal. The cycle of mortality, a spiritual concept of life, death and rebirth, is a recurring theme in the work.
Black aims to create a pictorial language that rests just below the conscious surface. The paintings resist a singular interpretation, preferring to leave some questions unanswered, as they are in life. Black unites the organic with the artificial, bringing together independent shapes, beings, and objects, to create a whole. Images rest within images, elevating simplicity to a more profound meaning with added depth. Alongside the painters Edward Hicks (1780-1849) and Horace Pippin (1888-1946), the artist takes inspiration from the world-building in the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) and N.K. Jemisin (1972-). The imagery in the exhibition presents an otherworldly connection between earth and the heavens while searching for new futures within ostensibly fixed systems.
