Brightly saturated and fantastical, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy explores the meeting of nature and flesh in oil paintings and ceramics. With invented creatures and visceral biological imagery, the works reframe the gaze towards the bodily through a lens of wonder — a less punitive lens than the centuries-long and still recurring traditions of bodies as commodified, objectified, or sinful. 

 

This exhibition addresses our discomfort surrounding the body by combining it with the godly imposing presence of the landscape, like waterfalls and billowing clouds. In this combination, the work is imbued with a devotional, almost sacred quality, borrowing visuals of the holy and filling it with the biological. The sticky, hairy, fleshy becomes something worth staring at with open fascination, the same way we are in awe of exotic plants, or deep-sea creatures, illuminating the sublime inherent in the corporeal. 

 

By zooming in on the glistening, wet thresholds, the work blurs the boundary between interior and exterior anatomy. Tendrils and drips converge to give birth to strange life forms and new worlds that explore sensuality, womanhood, and the fantastic. 

 

Documenting a coming of age, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy acknowledges the fullness of becoming a woman: the awareness of feeling both precious and strange, once intimately known, yet foreign to yourself. In creating these fantastical ecologies, the work insists on its own terms for beauty, redefined through tender curiosity. 

 

 

Victoria Mercado-Lues (b. 2003) is a Mexican-American artist whose oil paintings, ceramics, and collage conjure vivid ecologies of invented creatures and fantastical flesh. Her work merges the biological with the devotional, reframing the body as a site of wonder rather than shame.

 

Mercado-Lues received her BFA from the University of South Florida and her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she was awarded a residency through GROW in partnership with Creative Greensboro. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Carolyn M. Wilson Gallery, International Museum of Surgical Science, Proxy Design Gallery, and the Sechrest Gallery, among others. 

 

Learn more at victoriamercadolues.wixsite.com/arts  | IG: @victoriamercadolues