Local artist Lucy Koshan will be featured at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery as the 2020 Studio Watch Exhibition Emerging Artist.
The exhibition will be on display at Gallery on Queen in Fredericton starting September 26 and will run until mid-October.
Koshan will feature work from 2016, the third year of her BFA at Mount Allison, to her most recent work from the past winter.
LK: So having a solo show that’s like this, where I have quite a bit of space to show works in, is really unique. I work in a relatively small studio space, it’s just an extra bedroom in my apartment, so I’ve never seen all of my paintings or laid out in one space together. That’s just going to be really amazing in and of itself. Especially because of the way that work, where I work, in theory, in a sort of larger series where paintings build on one another. There are a lot of cross references, most paintings share a color scheme or a color relationship with one another. Whether [they are] in the same setting, or they kind of look like they could be and in my mind, they kind of all work together to create this really indirect narrative or some version of a specific tone or story that they bring up. That’s my intention, but I’ve never actually seen my works all in one space together to see whether that’s what they achieve together. This is my first chance to have that happen.
Koshan says she understands that COVID-19 prevents many from visiting galleries, but says that something may be lost when viewing art online.
LK: I mean, one of the things that I value the most about being part of an arts community is that we can get together in spaces like Struts and the Owens. We can have artist talks or symposiums that are centered not just around the sort of visual nature of visual art, but also the shared values and the concepts that underlie a lot of what we do. So for example, the Handmade Assembly or Sappyfest, the kind of visual arts aspects of that. A big part of it is people gathering together and then meeting people and chatting with people. It’s so important to see paintings in person. They have a texture and a physical presence, and a big part of my work is the scale that I make it at. I feel like when you’re presented with a painting that’s five feet tall, you almost have a confrontation with it the same way that you would have with the physical body of another human. It’s really deliberate in the physical way that I build paintings, like any painter, and so I think there’s a risk with seeing images of work online when it’s paintings and drawings and sculpture to have it just being about an image. One of the reasons that I still choose to make paintings despite the fact that they’re so impractical and cumbersome is that physical relationship and viewing it. It really is sad that that is not possible right now.
Koshan will have her first ever artist talk at the gallery, which will have limited in person seating and will be broadcasted on Facebook Live on September 27th at 3PM.
Seats can be reserved by email at adda@beaverbrookartgallery.org.
Physical distancing is required and masks are recommended for in-person attendance.
By M. Cunningham
