Natia Lemay
Manqué Melancholia

From June 1st to July 6, 2024

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Manqué Melancholia, by Natia Lemay. This exhibition of paintings and sculpture delves into the profound echoes between Lemay's journey and the sentiments embedded within the words and between the lines of a recently departed matriarch's final message to her family. Lemay’s aunt, Ruby McQueen, was a woman born in, as she describes, a "one-room shack" in Cantonment, Florida. She recounts her experience being adopted by her father and relocating to New Brunswick, Canada, for “a better life." She details a complicated mother-daughter relationship, her reflections on love and family, and her discovery of selfhood through social encounters with friends in Canada and her later journey back to the South. These works encapsulate her message's explicit and underlying layers: a poignant yearning for what could have been and a lingering sense of incompleteness.

Working entirely from memory, Lemay composes figures within a domestic landscape to reconstruct an emotional experience, rather than a literal reinterpretation. Her works intertwine historical, social, and political resonances semiotically, encapsulating an embodied experience that reverberates through generations. Crafted from strokes and washes of black paint, her paintings vividly communicate the tension between interior sensations and exterior relationships.

By utilizing oil and acrylic paint on canvas and wood panels, the focus is not on the materials, but rather on prioritizing the tool and motion as indexes and interventions. Techniques like creating gestural brush marks to shape space, scraping and carving the paint to build, reduce or enhance elements within the artwork are employed. These all-black compositions are constructed without preconceived drawings, studies, or photographs, and black paint is applied directly from the tube, allowing for an improvisational and intuitive process that delves into the subconscious to bring forth these artworks.

Racial politics and representation are an ongoing subtext within Lemay’s work. This perpetual, ambivalent interrogation of 'Black Art' and the Black Representational Space is a discourse that philosophers and sociologists like Lewis R. Gordon, Darby English, Franz Fanon, W.E.B Du Bois, and Allain Locke have explored. Lemay builds upon this exploration by contradicting what is considered ‘Black Art’ in her work’s subject matter while simultaneously adhering to the artistic tropes embedded within Black Art’s conceptual framework.

Natia Lemay (b. 1985 in Toronto, Ontario) was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and is based in New Haven, Connecticut. Her interdisciplinary autoethnographic practice reflects her experience as an IBPOC woman and mother living with inherited, transgenerational, and collective trauma. Through personal stories, she interrogates the intersections between the mind, the body, and space to understand how these experiences relate to a broader cultural context.

Lemay has exhibited widely throughout North America. The artist was selected for the 2024 Fountainhead Residency in Miami, and the 2022 Royal Drawing School Residency in Dumfries, Scotland. She was awarded the National Trust Prize at Expo Chicago 2024, with her work acquired by the High Museum in Atlanta. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design in 2021 with a Minor in Social Sciences and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023.