NADA New York 2023

With a focus on painting’s intersections with cinema, photography and music, Rachel Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, from found moving imagery and her own photographs. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering these fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended. Within this, her strategic use of ambiguity creates resonant pauses, allowing emotional undercurrents to come forth and find resolve.

Characteristically, in ‘Costume III’, Lancaster depicts the decontextualised details of a found object, scaled up and remade in oil paint: in this case, the jewels embroidered on a fabric surface. Her technical attention to the interplay of light, shadow and reflection lend a bright realism to the work, playing off against its inherent mystery. The unusual scale, cropped composition and shift in focus both invite the viewer to analyse material details more closely, and generate this sense of mystery, through a radical detachment from context: at once, paradoxically, Lancaster asks us to imagine her subject’s wider meaning, and narrows our attention toward the aesthetic form itself.