Woman with a Juice Box

Soft Opening is pleased to present Woman with a Juice Box, a solo exhibition from Shannon Cartier Lucy. In Woman with a Juice Box, Shannon Cartier Lucy’s most recent suite of paintings continue a subversion of the aesthetics of nostalgia, via a distortion of the visual language of American domesticity. In her work, the Nashville-based artist seeks to unearth repressed feelings and ideas, exposing the psychological claustrophobia of a past at once personal and collective. In her most emotionally autobiographical group of works to-date, the artist combines her signature cropped compositions and anonymous figures with motifs from childhood. In their charged stillness, figures interact with objects including building blocks, a curling plastic straw, coloured pencils, a juice box and more, in order to engender a confronting tenor of oddly familiar discomfort within the exhibition. The uncanny combination of disobedience and estrangement with sentimental intimacy that continues to be characteristic of Lucy’s work here enables the artist to examine the psychological architecture of adulthood. In Woman with a Juice Box, the artist’s focus remains our relationship to our repressed memories, thoughts and feelings and by extension, how we unrelentingly seek their resolution. Lucy imagines and constructs her compositions akin to the way our subconscious builds dreams: through non-linear connections that often confuse and distort reality into an otherwise unforeseen sequence of images and perceptions. Shannon Cartier Lucy (b. 1977, Nashville, USA) lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work will soon be included in the exhibition In Her Place at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2026). Lucy’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2024); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Massimo De Carlo, Milan (2022); Lubov, New York (2021); Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong (2021); Soft Opening, London (2021); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020); Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami (2020); De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Lubov, New York (2020); and Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York (2007, 2006), among others. Lucy’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024); CCS Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2022); Massimo De Carlo, Milan (2021); Karma, New York (2020) and Soft Opening, London (2020). Cartier Lucy is a two-time recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019, 2021). Her monograph Better Call It Grace was published by Hassla Books in 2021. She holds an MS from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2017) and a BA from New York University (2000).