JDJ is thrilled to debut a new series of paintings by Lucia Love at NADA Miami 2022.

Lucia Love has long interrogated the dynamics of power within symbols through imagined juxtapositions of bodies and their relations. It’s a practice of making her own adjustments to the pictorial canon.

While her previous work has focused on the idealized bodies of angelic figures and monumental statues, here these figures float as if suspended in gelatinous respite—a trophy of a different sort, more relic than monument.

Like the boluses of wax inside lava lamps that orbit around according to changing density, the skins of Love’s figures are arrested in a visual display of viscosity, specimens that have been removed of their bones, hair, and nails.

In communion with Love’s longstanding interest in unpacking the symbolic scaffolding of gender, the bodies throughout the Spancil series have been de-sexed. In place of head, breasts, and genitalia, are holes, craters, and slits.

And yet in some ways, their absence highlights their presence. “How am I judged for having holes?” Love asks. There is an uneasy eroticism in the hole—it both disturbs and invites in its darkness and uncertainty.

Within these new paintings, presented here for the first time at NADA Miami, limbs warp and flow as if trying to keep its posture, to maintain some form of stability. The figures contort themselves, pushing up against the edges of the picture in front of exuberantly patterned backgrounds.

“The name spancil is taken from Arthurian legend,” writes New York-based artist Lucia Love. “It refers to the skin of a knight used in a love spell that can transform the wearer into your life-long love.”

The Irish folklorist Thomas Johnson Westropp made brief mention of this “horrible” charm in his 1922 article “Folklore on the Coasts of Connacht, Ireland,” where he describes a peasant custom of wrapping a continuous loop of skin around a young man’s body while he slept so to predict whom he would marry. It also happens to sound like stencil. Love got the idea for this new series of paintings while operating a laser cutter to make stencils for painting, a process of making holes in paper that she likens to the skin of the body, and the multitudes of holes that perforate our own outer membrane.

Like the folkloric spancil used to find true love, Love’s spancils offer themselves up to be consumed by the viewer in contemplating the barrier between human and not-quite human—what it means to be potentially de-humanized for having holes.

Lucia Love (b. 1988, New York, NY, lives and works in NY) attended the School of Visual Arts on a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, where they studied painting and animation. They are a co-host of the Art and Labor podcast, where they chronicles the stories of social justice organizing within the arts. Art and Labor focuses on the human cost of the art world and advocates for fair labor practices for artists, museum workers, art handlers, interns, and anyone traditionally overworked and underpaid in the field.