Roz Lord
Two Volcanoes

June 26 to August 1, 2021

Ampersand is pleased to present Two Volcanoes, an exhibition of new paintings by Roz Lord. Language, she notes, is integral to her working process and that her titles form as a painting develops. Words are also often incorporated into the geometry of her compositions. Both, she says, act more as an embellishment rather than a label or description. Though simple and direct, as viewers we are compelled to fill in the blanks and guess at their significance. Two volcanoes, for instance, are paired in one particular painting with a red-horned buffalo—something like landscape and petroglyph mixed with pure fantasy. Given its direct relation to the exhibition title, perhaps this painting acts as a sign post or a key of some kind. It seems situated as a turning point between a series of somewhat older works centered more on landscape and newer paintings and drawings that focus on abstraction and narrative. Lord notes that a natural seasonality to her working process results from living in the desert of southern California. The cooler winter months find her outdoors internalizing and interpreting the landscapes of the region. When hot temperatures arrive, she’s back inside acting as her own muse, reimagining bits of pop culture or taking cues from crudely handmade objects that she collects. Shifts in weather are a mere fact, though, and certainly don’t account entirely for the unique diversity of Lord’s paintings. Centered on a daily drawing practice, she intentionally works in seemingly unrelated groupings, three series of subjects at any given time to help keep things fresh. In the case of this current exhibition we see animal forms mashed up into coloring book abstraction; theater performers amid the seedy backdrops of imaginary night films; a lone Rider atop a mysterious horse-like creature. They are disparate motifs made congruent by an undercurrent of intuition, humor and levity—the knowingness of an artist in command of her own inner world. Or, as Lord recently put it in an Instagram post featuring the title painting, “Because one volcano isn’t enough.”

Roz Lord (b. 1965) lives and works in Palm Desert, California. She received training in Classical Art at Mission: Renaissance in the late 1970s with additional studies at the Riviera Fine Art Center in 2001. Two Volcanoes is her debut exhibition at the gallery.