Night Gallery is pleased to present Bucket of Birds, a new body of oil paintings by Shannon Cartier Lucy. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery following Rubedo in 2023.

Lucy's paintings have always operated in the space where the recognizable becomes strange. Working from assembled and altered source images, she describes her practice as one of deliberate disruption, reorienting the pictures until something latent surfaces. The results are pictures that feel simultaneously clear and unresolved, their apparent straightforwardness riddled with ambiguity. Lucy uses tight, cinematic framing to press the viewer close to her subjects, and that proximity has a way of making ordinary objects feel charged with something not entirely named: pencils, pasta necklaces, a goldfish bowl on a stove. 

Bucket of Birds emerged not from a predetermined concept but from proximity, from the daily texture of Lucy's life surrounded by animals. Over the past several years, the artist has kept chickens, and in caring for them has confronted something she could not easily look away from: death as ordinary, recurring, and intimate. Lucy describes an accumulating grief that attaches itself not just to individual losses but to larger questions about survival, the ecosystem, and humanity's profound disconnection from both. These paintings do not resolve those questions. They live inside them.

The works are characteristically Lucy's, uncanny and off-kilter, rendered with a disarming deadpan that holds humor and unease in equal tension. What changes here are the subjects. In place of human protagonists, birds take center stage: ducks, roosters, mourning doves, turkeys, occupying Lucy's familiar psychological terrain with the same strange authority her figures always have. Here, human presences take the back seat, appearing only insofar as they handle the birds: a pair of hands emerging from outside the frame, a breast against which two mourning doves are held. 

The exhibition's title painting begins with a bowl full of duck heads, an image the artist describes with characteristic self-awareness as one that bothered her, not because it reaches for violence, but because it simply appears and insists on being looked at. In other works, two mourning doves rest against a woman's breast; a turkey stands as the main character in a bright, sun-drenched scene crowded with the whole flock of chickens. A still life features eggs, a steak, knives, and a pencil, carrying the mustard yellows and reds that recur throughout, colors pulled from somewhere between the farmyard and the gut.

Taken together, the paintings in Bucket of Birds suggest that Lucy's project has always been less about subject matter than about a particular quality of attention: close, precise, and utterly her own. Whether the canvas holds decapitated ducks, steak and eggs, or a turkey standing in bright afternoon light, the effect is the same. Something familiar is held up and examined until it yields something unexpected, until the viewer finds themselves looking twice.