Lucy McKenzie at Art Night

By Rachel Ashenden, 21.06.2023

Installation View, Lucy McKenzie, Giving Up The Shadows On My Face, Cabinet, London

Visual artist Lucy McKenzie (b.1977) is known for employing a degree of deception in her paintings-turned-installations through the technique of ‘trompe l’oeil’. French for ‘to deceive the eye’, trompe l’oeil is notably present in McKenzie’s imaginary room ‘May of Teck’ (2010). The installation drew inspiration from the architecture of her Glaswegian childhood as well as Muriel Spark’s 1963 novella ‘The Girls of Slender Means’. Complete with fingerprint-stained light switches and wallpaper peeling from water damage, ‘May of Teck’ documents the deterioration of a grand Georgian townhouse to an unkempt bedsit, reminiscent of the homes once populated by the artist’s friends. Residency is equally important in her new film ‘Náhrdelník’, which premieres at Art Night Dundee. The illusory marble walls which are often found in her trompe l’oeil works reappear in this experimental film, prompting a painter in the film to destroy her pallet in chaotic frustration.

Beading together found footage from the depths of YouTube, ‘Náhrdelník’, Slovak for ‘necklace’, takes its name from a 90s Czech television drama. Appropriating the TV show for new ends, McKenzie explores the ‘phenomena of high art’ and its transformation into a medium ready for mass consumption. Steadfast in acknowledging her ‘artistic limits’, McKenzie points out that she is not a filmmaker, but she does watch a lot of TV and has been investigating the structure of narrative fiction. However, McKenzie ‘deliberately didn’t try to find out the narrative of the original drama’ before creating her own; instead, her Náhrdelník teases out the interplay of aesthetics and politics entrenched within the set. Built during the interwar period, the modernist house where the TV drama unfolds was designed in 1930 by Adolf Loos (1870-1933), accused and partially convicted child molester. Acting as McKenzie’s ‘chosen cypher’, Loos’s background presence in the new film furthers the contentious debate about separating the art from the artist. McKenzie has been driven to consider the historical significance of Interbellum buildings elsewhere in her practice, particularly in her solo show ‘La Kermesse Heroique’ (Venice, 2017). She describes how: ‘You can’t think about design in that period without acknowledging the devastation that was around the corner’.

To make Náhrdelník, McKenzie drew upon her own memories of visiting the Czech building, linking it to her ‘own experience of domestic space [as] permeable[,] creative and political’. In Brussels, where the artist is currently based, she lives and works in the same building, the distinction between public and private fluctuating as she paints, sculpts, and writes. Her French and Dutch speaking skills are somewhat limited, so she makes art, like Náhrdelník, ‘away from language [...] on a purely visual or experimental level.’

McKenzie wants to know about every nook and cranny of the buildings that beguile her, including how they smell and sound. Closer to her Scottish roots, McKenzie cites Shelley Klein’s memoir of growing up in High Sunderland as a source of inspiration. With its wooden and glass structure, this iconic mid-century house in the Borders was designed by Peter Womersley and commissioned by the author’s father, Bernat Klein. Given the artist’s emphasis on design as a uniquely subversive medium, it is fitting, then, that Náhrdelník will be uniquely presented in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room. In the words of the artist, this is a space where ‘design is explored so fully and conscientiously’. In 2018, the Oak Room was rebuilt from hundreds of pieces, finding its permanent home in the V&A Dundee, after almost 50 years in storage.

Náhrdelník will be exhibited within Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room in the Scottish Design Galleries at V&A Dundee until 9^th July

https://artnight.org.uk