One eye filled with night, a solo exhibition by local oil painter Laura Lewis, is the latest installation at downtown Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art.
Lewis worked on the pieces for this show for nearly two years. In that time, she attended Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York City, where she was free to experiment and push artistic boundaries in her studio to determine what direction to pursue next. The exhibit is inspired by a number of diverse source materials. One such example is the academic work Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed, which Lewis used as a guide to understand how 2SLGBTQIA+ figures interact with heteronormative coded spaces around them.
“[Queer Phenomenology is] a crucial guide in understanding how our actions and orientations towards objects and spaces are shaped by and reflect social norms and identities, especially for those with non-normative or queer orientations,” Lewis explained. “I’ve never really painted a figure in spaces before, so I was really interested in how to recontextualize the figure and how objects and spaces can imply identities.”
“[Ahmed] argues that […] queer folks move through space with a non-normative [orientation] or disorientation,” she elaborated.
The show also incorporates elements of film noir, especially Vertigo and The Woman in the Window. Lewis highlights that both films deal with themes of strong desire and facing punishment for them. Film noir’s combination of unease and dream-like qualities feeds into the uncanny sentiment of the figures not quite belonging in the spaces around them. Many pieces display doubles of characters interacting with themselves, hazy blurs of light spots and trails, reflections, gazing eyes, moons and above all else, dark blue hues.
Lewis recalled, “I wanted to go further into exploring psychosomatic conflict and diving deeper into the psyche so that people can reflect on their own [psyches] and how they move through the world.”
At the back of the gallery, there is a standalone wall with paintings on each side. When the viewer walks around to the back side, they will see a large self-portrait of Lewis titled “Déjà Vu,” depicting herself in a chaotic gaze straight at the viewer. Behind the figure is the obscured projection of a wall of text, which Lewis revealed to be a letter from a doctor concerning an unprecedented seizure she experienced while in art school nearly a decade ago.
“It was such a strange event,” Lewis reflected on “Déjà Vu.” “Everything that I’ve been dealing with in these [kinds] of paintings, like seeing […] what’s reality, what’s dreams, is kind of encapsulated in that moment for me.”
Lewis’s creative process for the show has been highly collaborative and emotional. All the models in the show’s art pieces are people very close to her, including her partner. Each figurative art piece began with them having a photoshoot together, using digital and film cameras. Lewis shared the photos with the models, discussed ideas for the pieces and obtained their consent to recreate the photos with oil paint. Upon completion, she also unveiled each painting to their respective models before any other viewers.
“Introspection” features fellow figurative oil painter Brianna Wentz as Lewis’s model in a reimagining of Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” “Introspection” differs from the original by depicting the bartender in conversation with herself as the patron, who does not appear in the mirror. It was composed from a photoshoot taken of Wentz at the local restaurant Sous Sol, taken after the establishment’s manager kindly made an offer for Lewis to use the space for an afternoon as a way to support her artistic endeavours.
Another such example is “Liquid Red,” a still-life of items belonging to Lewis’s friend. They include an ashtray, lipstick, a carabiner, matchsticks, an empty cup and spilled nail polish. The piece is based in Lewis’s philosophy of objects informing personal identity. She describes the piece as “a way to build a representation of the figure in their absence.”
One eye filled with night runs at Plug In ICA until Jan. 9, 2027. An artist talk will be held on Nov. 12 from 5 to 7 p.m., and a curatorial talk and tour will be held on Nov. 28 from 2 to 3 p.m.
