Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17, 6–9 PM
McLennon Pen Co. is pleased to announce Everything Is a Little Surreal, a group exhibition featuring Emma Beatrez, Charlotte Fox, Dominique Fung, Becky Kolsrud, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Emily Mae Smith, and C. Lucy R. Whitehead.
The exhibition brings together seven contemporary women painters whose work occupies the liminal space between the familiar and the uncanny. Utilizing surrealist strategies and sensibilities to disrupt ordinary experience, the presented paintings and sculptures operate where figuration slips into dream logic, psychological allegory, and symbolic narrative. Across the exhibition, recognizable bodies become highly unstable, resisting singular accounts of gender and approaching identity, power, and passion through different visual vocabularies.
Individual practices within the exhibition reveal how these familiar forms become psychologically charged. Emily Mae Smith’s anthropomorphic broom collapses distinctions between object, female figure, and phallus, while her recurring hook functions as a surrealist hieroglyph. The forms in C. Lucy R. Whitehead’s paintings are abstract, yet insistently reference the body. Forms begin to suggest anatomical structures without ever resolving as fully human, occupying an uncertain space between the organic and the sculpted.
For Becky Kolsrud, imagined scenes take on the quality of inner worlds, like a giant egg with feminine legs poking out but void of other features. The subjects are set within ambiguous environments and desolate landscapes beneath her signature deep blue sky—recalling the enigmatic, suspended worlds found in the work of Gertrude Abercrombie and Salvador Dalí.
Elsewhere, artists use atmosphere as a means of entering surreal territory. Emma Beatrez’s paintings evoke half-remembered dreams, utilizing light as a psychological device rather than a mere visual element. In Charlotte Fox’s canvases, the nude bodies fragment and dissolve under a painterly fog or veil, drawing the viewer into fanciful worlds seemingly shaped by both fantasy and nightmares.
The artists also anchor the surreal with art-historical and cultural associations. Shannon Cartier Lucy’s still life Brioche places the elements of a contemporary meal within the recognizable format of an Old Master still life, but their strange handling produces an uneasy, almost humorous violence: pencils pierce the brioche and wedge of blue cheese like arrows. The familiar becomes subtly absurd.
Dominique Fung similarly animates images that might otherwise remain inert. The format of her antique jewelry boxes recalls the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell. Fung’s recurring fish motifs carry layered associations across cultures. Painted with a visual language inspired by artifacts such as Chinese Shang-dynasty and Warring States jade and bronze, Fung’s fish seem to come alive, hovering between relic, living thing, and symbol.
Rather than abandoning reality, these artists destabilize its familiar forms, using figuration in different ways to probe the space between recognition and uncertainty. Across these distinct practices, realism becomes a point of departure rather than an endpoint, giving way to the subconscious, fantasy, memory, and desire.
Everything Is a Little Surreal opens Saturday, October 17, at McLennon Pen Co. in Austin, Texas.
Homepage Image: Shannon Cartier Lucy, Brioche, 2025, unique, oil on canvas, 28 x 32 inches (© Shannon Cartier Lucy, Courtesy the Artist and MASSIMODECARLO)