July 23, 2004
PRESS RELEASE

                                            LUCY WILLIAMS
                                       'Stranger than Paradise'

The McKEE Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of work by LUCY WILLIAMS which will open on FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 - 8:00 pm.

Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England, in 1972 and lives in London. She first studied at the Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal Academy Schools in London where she received several prestigious honors.

Ms. Williams portrays early modernist, architectural environments whose striking purity stand in stark contrast to the tender, idyllic world of nature and to an urban landscape of traditional building styles. The three dimensional constructions in the current exhibition explore the use of multi-layered relief and the contrasting materiality of textures as shown by her use of perspex, balsa wood, fabric, cut out paper and embroidery. Interior and exterior images from period photographs are subtly transformed by reworking the picture, until they conform to her ideal vision of defined space and are no longer clinical, architectural records. While an eerie lack of human presence emphasizes their abstract form, psychological tension is heightened by a sense of waiting for something to happen, crowds to appear, or voices to be heard. The conflicts between old and new, cold and intimate, can exist in a strange, but welcome, harmony.

Sixteen works are to be included in the exhibition, and an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe will be available.

The exhibition continues through Saturday, October 9. For more information and photographs, please contact Kendra McLaughlin at the gallery, telephone: 212-688-5951, or email: kendra@mckeegallery.com.

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