ARTIST STATEMENT

Coe Lapossy is an interdisciplinary visual artist educator committed to collaboration.

Through a resistance to the tenets of modernism, Lapossy centers erased histories and marginalized labor. They create work that revels in the subversive: how it sneaks in and makes change and how it works undetected because it must. They revisit artifacts of queerness wedged within a seemingly straight world, choosing these references and linking narratives from various times throughout history—things forgotten, erased, messages that 'flew under the radar'. By reusing these artifacts, they meditate on what bodies we value, how we memorialize, and what/who survives under the conditions we create.

Lapossy (b. 1980, Medina, OH) has created site-specific works for Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Clough-Hanson Gallery (Rhodes College), Dimensions Variable (Miami, FL), Elsewhere Living Museum (Greensboro, NC), the Howard Art Project (Boston, MA), and The Boston Center for Arts. 

"Coe Lapossy’s work is so fluid, self-determining, and empowered with such agency that it literally speaks for itself. Talkies, their video series of speaking paintings, takes its dialogue from Craig Lucas’s stage play Prelude To a Kiss, a “Freaky Friday”-like body-swap story about an old man who inhabits the body of a young, pessimistic bride. In Lapossy’s videos, the play’s characters swap bodies with the artist’s paintings, complaining about trivialities of life through pairs of impasto lips. The body and disrupting the binary in which it exists are central to Lapossy’s practice, and their approach to painting is no different. Also on view here are a series of new works whose supports are pliable, secondhand pillows whose floral surfaces have been painted and repurposed. In this sense the performative in Lapossy’s work extends both to video and the malleable material support for their work, disrupting hierarchies within the history of painting and charting new futurities in which to connect with other bodies, painterly or otherwise."

-Evan Garza

*essay commissioned for Dimensions Variable Gallery's "Can I Sit Next To You?"