HAPPYOLOGY

Lounsberry’s protagonists wander familiar landscapes with an unfamiliar voice-over. Her figures’ interiority comes to the forefront through moments of heightened emotions: a baseball player at the plate, a musician lost in a solo, an embrace at sunset, or two artists indulging in each other’s talent. The nude women of her images become mythological figures exuding self-love and confidence. Depicted in a continuous search for divine inspiration, love, and sisterhood, Lounsberry’s figures exult in taking over the historically male arenas of athletics, the outdoors, and modernist art history — and they always do so while feeling at ease and without self-consciousness.

Most prescient, the paintings are neither overburdened or laborious in their pursuits. Effortless paint handling conjures colorful flesh stretching through idyllic landscapes, while narratives emerge from humorous imagery interwoven through kaleidoscopic spaces. Occasionally sliding into tableau compositions utilizing symmetry of the divine, her world building is one of utopian harmony. The work finds inspiration in David Ross’s mantra of pursuing, "[The] politics of ecstasy and the ecstasy of the everyday.” Lounsberry found resonance between Ross’s mantra and Yusef Lateef’s 1957 track “Happyology,” the exhibition title namesake. Surrounded by a discourse drawing boundaries for culture wars, Lounsberry’s work trespasses in a state of bliss.