Lyne Lapointe: Becoming Animal

Press Release

LYNE LAPOINTE
Becoming Animal
513 W 20th Street, New York, NY
February 27 – April 12, 2025

Opening reception on Thursday, February 27 from 6–8PM

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Becoming Animal, an exhibition of new work by Lyne Lapointe that expands upon her previous representations of the many ways the body—gendered or otherwise—finds resilience, freedom and protection in a world where it is consistently made to feel fragile and ‘othered.’

Inspired by a passage in A Thousand Plateaus, written by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the exhibition title recalls the attitude they describe as being essential to the creative process: ‘becoming animal,’ or, an ability to inhabit different material and ontological perspectives. This phrase philosophically expresses a consistent quality in Lapointe’s work, namely her ability to ‘embody’ her materials—whether it be ink or glass beads, coral or abandoned beehives—by allowing them to retain their own specificity while also fully incorporating them into the pictorial spaces of her figures. Just as Lapointe’s materials contribute to the transformation of her figures, so too do they undergo their own metamorphosis as they are integrated into the compositions, a process that reflects the body’s capacity to adapt and change while still retaining continuity with the past. 

Over the past four decades Lapointe has created poetic and materially complex works that consider the corporeal and psychological consequences of existing in a world of uncertainty. Her site-specific installations and architectural interventions created throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in partnership with critic and artist Martha Fleming, established many of these essential thematic concerns. At their core was the role that social spaces play in creating and modifying subjectivity, an experience Lapointe has continued to dissect and explore through other media, including the paintings on paper in this exhibition. Together, they demonstrate her consistent focus on the body and its relationship to external factors, whether they be socially constructed or naturally occurring. 

Through research, careful sourcing and sustainable practices, Lapointe has expanded her process to include heterogeneous materials and found objects alike. In Beehives Apiarists (2024), the diptych’s beehives have been affixed to the figures while propolis—a resin-like substance produced by bees and typically used for medicinal purposes—has been used to cover the works entirely. In Mother of Pearl (2024), a large shell has been placed at the center of the figure while pearls punctuate the background. In Vitro (2024) brings together blown glass eggshells, hemp and recycled linens. Lapointe’s method of collecting these items, locating additional materials and preserving their respective histories is a process that metaphorically expresses her long-standing desire to use resources that not only describe our world, but that remind us of its innate worth and beauty and thus of our own as well.

By incorporating objects found in nature and the home, Lapointe creates moments that reimagine the body and place it in a point of transition. At times between genders, while at others void of identity altogether, her figures always question the viability of personal expression in our current socio-political context. Though typically characterized by vulnerability and fragility, they also and just as often embody a position of triumphant resistance to a world that seeks to restrict gender expression, categorize sexuality and stigmatize ‘otherness.’ When responding to a world of danger and hostility her figures can don protective armor, as in Black Billed Cuckoo / Magnolia Grandiflora (2023) and Okinawa (2024). In the series The Head and the Body (2024) Lapointe renders each figure in both deep black ink and shimmering gold leaf, suggesting an inner psychological world that the materials merely hint at. This is a world where resilience and radiance take form as proffered by the gold leaf, while tenacity, seen in the deep opacity and outward reaching gesture of the inked figure, takes root.

Though Lapointe’s practice has often centered femininity and womanhood in its many personal and social forms, in Becoming Animal she has gone one step further by creating figures that appear genderless, or which seem to exist outside of such rigid codification entirely. The found objects she uses to characterize these anonymous forms also signify their environmental context and invite viewers to consider the works through the lens of environmentalism. By encouraging each figure to occupy multiple ontological perspectives at once, Lapointe creates both a literal and conceptual connection to the construction of the works themselves. They straddle the line between painting, sculpture and collage, while finding ways to express the body in a fugue state through her singular craftsmanship and mastery of materials—or as Deleuze and Guattari write, they seek to ‘un-human the human.’

About Lyne Lapointe

Lyne Lapointe studied history and visual arts at the University of Ottawa before returning to Montreal in the early 1980s. She soon made a name for herself as one of the most intriguing artists of her generation with her ground-breaking site projects created over a period of about 15 years with critic and artist Martha Fleming. Studiolo, a retrospective and accompanying book covers this collaborative work, recognized as a chapter in the history of alternative art, feminist thought and community activism. In 1997, following a near-death accident, Lapointe moved to the country near Mansonville, Québec, where she lives and works today.

Lapointe’s work has been shown at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; the New Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Canada and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec and the Musée de Joliette, Québec. In 2002, a major mid-career survey exhibition of her solo production, The Blind Spot, was organized and toured by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal with venues across Canada and abroad, including at the Musée de la Rochelle in France.

Her work has been shown in countless group exhibitions and can be found in major public collections, among them, the Brown University Art Museum, Providence; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 1997 and the Graff Prize in 1998. This was followed by numerous research grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2012, she was awarded the Québec Studio in New York.