Monique Lacey is an Auckland based artist who recently graduated from Whitecliffe College of Arts and design with a MFA (hons).

 

Monique has previously exhibited at The Vivian Gallery, Malcolm Smith Gallery, RM Gallery, Demo, and West End Art Space in Melbourne. Monique is a finalist in this year’s National Contemporary Art Award.

 

Her recent work manifests itself in the production of hollow, rectilinear-cuboid-forms, which present themselves as support and surface. The relationship between the front-facing plane and the sides of the work can challenge the traditional conventions of painting when the proportional relationships of scale are reconfigured.
 

The works function as benign violations of the established legacies of power that can be traced back through the histories of the Baroque, De Stijl, and Modernism to the power of the boardrooms that became the resting place of Minimalism. Where this language of form and its male-centered narratives were once central and perhaps pertinent, today this language seems outdated, hollow and tiresome.