Lucas Gandy       lucas.currio@gmail.com       Cambridge, MA

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After completing the Southern Oregon Art Academy, a program based on the classic painting atelier, I joined Cornell Fine Arts. There I took to modern and living art, expanding my practice with sculpture, video, and applied research.

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I work as a freelance designer, studio artist, and teacher at The House of Colors in Brookline, MA. ​

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My work has been shown at The Johnson Museum (Ithaca, NY), Front Art Space (NYC), Tjaden Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY), John Hartell Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Bibliowicz Family Gallery (Ithaca, NY), The Rogue Gallery & Art Center (Medford, OR), the House of Colors (Brookline, MA), and others spaces.

I have interned with artist Pietro Ruffo in Rome and Carrie Mae Weems in New York.

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Sculpture:

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Engaging with ideas of cleansing, my practice explores good and bad as literalizations of what we consider clean and dirty (e.g. the “clean fight”, “dirty money”, and “cleanliness next to godliness”). As queer expression, linked to histories of AIDs and sodomy stigma, the work asks how moral hygiene might effect our social worlds.

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Materials used to subtract or substrate (soap, bleach, erasers, gesso, tube whites) here become additive and sculptural. Repeat bleaching “rots” fabric, soap takes on fungal character, and the gesso substrate is eroticized. These flips plays with divisions of living and sterile, organic and aesthetic. They engage and question minimalism, that deep refinement of subtraction, while relating affectionately to the 1990s abject movement and post-minimal sculpturing.

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The work is a collision of social and germ theories; where the ideal and living meet an impasse; our deadlock with dirt. 

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Painting:

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Meet the Millers is a an oil painting series dedicated to a vlogging channel that streams the lives of five children and their parents. The work reflects on early formations of identity, contemporary forms of spectacle, and the online document as means of “saving” a life.

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The paintings embrace intuitive and fluid qualities of oil paint. They draw on the image of meromictic lakes - bodies of water that stack themselves like layers of sheet cake, based on their salinity and chemical weight. This bizarre combination of vertical control and horizontal freedom occurs as a metaphor of painting. There is a responsive choreography between the directing hand, and the paint’s insistence to be free.

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