Studios Inc is pleased to present Lilly McElroy’s solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on view September 8th through October 21st, 2023.

An opening reception will be hosted on Friday, September 8th from 5-8 pm.

Lilly McElroy will host an artist talk on Saturday, September 9th from 12-1 pm.

From the artist:

“You are standing in a landscape. Maybe it is a pasture, or maybe it is the lakeshore on a summer evening, or maybe it is the top of a mountain, the wilderness past the end of the trail, but whatever this place is, in this moment, it feels safe. It feels stable. Then it doesn’t. All at once, there is dread and melancholy. You are here, waiting for an inevitable end. It is coming, you are grieving, but at least this place is pretty.

I will destroy you.

It’s natural to make photographs while you wait for the inevitable. Photography captures light and freezes time. It is an attempt to preserve the fleeting. For this exhibition photographs of the setting sun were made by McElroy using a 4 x 5 film camera. She then irrevocably altered the negatives, using her fingernail to scratch away the image of the sun. This action is small yet devastating; the anxious picking at a scab that leaves you with a lifelong scar. The sun, the very thing whose light makes the photograph possible, has been gouged out of the negative, the printed picture rendering this absence not as erasure revealing blank paper, but as the ominous birth of an angry black void. McElroy’s hand is directly linked to this destruction as the sun becomes a meteor, dark and crackling in the sky, a malevolent yellow nimbus dancing around it as it hurtles toward the surface of the earth, toward you.

In her monolithic works the sun is a dark orb that hovers over a bucolic field. It no longer emits energy or light; it only absorbs and you are standing in front of it. The innate silence of the photograph now presses down on the landscape. The rustling of the grass in the wind, the susurration of the insects in the field are cut off, and you can only hear the sounds of your own breath. McElroy made these images in the darkroom, laying negatives directly on top of light sensitive paper. With the press of a button, light flashed through the negative and struck the paper, chemically altering its structure. This transformation signals a shift, an irrevocable change, a violence that has been enacted and can’t be taken back.”

I Will Destroy You. will be on view thru October 21st. 

Exhibition hours: Wednesday through Friday from 10-4pm and Saturday from 12-4pm and by appointment 

Location: 1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO, 64108