Orchestrion

Lucy McKenzie gained international acclaim for her virtuoso use of illusionistic trompe-l’œil techniques that she often embeds in narrative spatial arrangements. Her interdisciplinary work, which comprises painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, and design, focuses on art and culture as media-based forms of expression of social and political conditions. More specifically, her interest centers on subjects such as public spaces, commercial art, consumer culture, and political propaganda. One of the key questions that inform her artistic practice is how they influence the depiction of women and the associated gender-specific power relations. Visitors entering the exhibition are greeted by a Faux Sports Shop, an installation McKenzie developed in collaboration with designer Beca Lipscombe and professional window dressers. Garments are suspended from nylon threads against a painted background that is reminiscent of a fashion store from a past era. The display window becomes a stage for consumer culture props while, in other exhibits, mannequins embody hybridity and raise questions around high versus mass culture. Elsewhere in the exhibition McKenzie reflects on statues in public space and monumental wall painting. Here the artist translates an iconic movie scene from American Psycho into a feminist counter-narrative. McKenzie repeatedly confronts fixed images with unsettling shifts of context. On the lower floor of fik3, she turns her attention to both the work and controversial biography of architect Adolf Loos (1870—1933), one of the most eminent proponents of Viennese Modernism who was indicted on charges of child sexual abuse in 1928. With an expansive architectural sculpture, a video piece, drawings and ready-mades, she builds a tense atmosphere that juxtaposes avant-garde ingenuity and patriarchal abuse of power. Lucy McKenzie’s show at jk3 also presents works inspired by moving panoramas and dioramas from the late nineteenth century, which are considered precursors to cinema and the immersive entertainment of the twentieth and twenty-first century, and were prevalent in the Prater amusement park. At the conclusion of their tour of the exhibition, visitors are invited to step into a train cabin with a panoramic view of a passing landscape, which draws on stylistic details of the Kärntner Bar that Loos designed now transformed into an amusement ride that can provide a temporary space of privacy and clandestine encounters. Orchestrion is McKenzie’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The title references a music automaton from the nineteenth century that was, in its day, able to imitate an entire orchestra and is now part of this exhibition courtesy of a loan from the Wien Museum. In Orchestrion, Lucy McKenzie takes on the role of a conductor, as it were, who arranges her works in a densely evocative visual concert, so as to critically reflect on the present moment through the prism of the past. Orchestrion is presented in cooperation with Z33 (Hasselt), Galerie Daniel Buchholz (Berlin/Cologne/New York), Cabinet Gallery (London), and CRAC Sète (France).