Lucy Keany

Lucy Keany is a collaborator. She works with performers and other artists, the participants in her videos and photographs are her surrogate material. Her own role is equal in the process of improvisation. In an examination of surface and seduction, she creates settings, which play to our fantasies and desires. A melding of different references from popular film, wishfully escapist monologues, and appropriations of music and script, combined with an emboldened use of site, make for layered narrative structures of intense colour. The overly exaggerated gestures of the burlesque dancer are a parody of seduction, far removed from a fumble in the dark. The contrived artificiality confronts our guilty pleasures head on, revelling in vulgarity and caricature. Her work invites us to fully succumb to the glossy bate of consumer culture, and attempt a carefree abandon.