Tahnee Lonsdale

0-0 LA is proud to present Tear Here, Tahnee Lonsdale’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, focusing on the artist’s highly individualistic approach to abstraction. Using painting, and for the first time, sculpture, Tear Here reveals how Lonsdale’s irreverent engagement with the figure exemplifies her entire philosophy of art making. Shifting, morphing, sabotaged or framed, for the viewer to ponder, figuration is a thread weaving across a decade of the artist’s works. By considering Lonsdale’s practice through the specific prism of figurative abstraction, Tear Here prompts us to re-examine the complexity of Lonsdale’s vision, providing a closer look at some of the impulses that create it.

Beginning with the sculptural formations Lonsdale observes from furniture, often discarded and haphazardly tossed, the artist moves from the object to the canvas and anthropomorphizes these abstract shapes into representations of the body. Her figures are rendered genderless and loosely repetitive, maintaining a compelling balance between order and chaos. On one hand, her gesture indicates a docile figure, tucked in on itself, or weaving and tying into another. On the other, an independent body moving away from it’s former entanglements.

Parallel to her semi-abstraction is Lonsdale’s use of color. With a whimsical flourish, her pink, yellow, orange, and dark green palettes are also frank and candid, making the color function almost as a material. Her commitment to genderless colors makes the viewer ask: what are we really seeing?

And, as Lonsdale tells it, “My roles as a [single] mother and women in general. The tug between needing to be at home and spending more time with my children and being in my studio working.” These dualities are realities men are not traditionally challenged with, making each of Lonsdale’s painting a peer into her personal journey juggling the ambiguous roles of a 21st century mother and artist. A role in which women are asked to simultaneously serve as the yin-and-yang-pole of the world: tangled and embroiled in a history of expectations attached to a nurturing and vulnerable persona, while existing in the expansive space of a woman’s inherent independence, power, and strength.

Lonsdale’s works thus present to us the final word on what it means to be human: a complex journey through multitudes of dichotomies. One that is neither simple nor stagnant, but ever challenged and evolving.

Tahnee Lonsdale holds a BFA from the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Since graduating in 2007, she has been short-listed for both the Dazed and Confused Emerging Artist Award and “100 Painters of Tomorrow.” Her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in her native Britain, as well as in the United States at venues such as: De Buck Gallery in New York, NY and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, CA. This is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Upcoming exhibitions include group shows at: LM Gallery in Rome and the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles. Lonsdale currently lives and works in Los Angeles.