Inspired by Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Lewis locates her interest in how domestic spaces, and objects shape queer identities. The compositions depict 2SLGBTQIA+ friends in their personal and familiar spaces layered with heady references to film noir, photography, and historical paintings. Often working at an experiential scale, these works solicit viewers to project themselves into the tableaux and join in the dramatic, intimate scenescapes.

Lewis creates an affective vision of environment and objecthood, where she explores dualities like desire/disgust and bliss/anguish through various painterly strategies. Borrowing narrative devices from filmic traditions, non-figurative works or “object scenes,” as Lewis refers to them, are companion to the portraits, revelatory clues to understanding this environment and its constituents. In some works, strategy and reference brush up against each other, building into a palpable compositional tension where looking feels nearly intrusive.

One eye filled with night navigates an interplay between psychological and physical space, the ego-centric and bodily focused affect, and the allocentric described physical space. As Ahmed explains in Queer Phenomenology, normative public and private spaces are encoded as heterosexual and cisgender, producing a disorientation for queer bodies within them. Lewis doesn’t resolve or even depict this tension; rather, this body of work uses a referential matrix of her own creation as an expository tool to make visible a dislocation.

This exhibition was initiated by Allison Yearwood, with contributions from Gilles Hébert.

Photos by Karen Asher