A Review of Jenny Lyon’s Senior Art Exhibition
by
Christian Hunt


         Last week, after a semester of devotion to her work, senior studio art major Jenny Lyon installed 
her senior exhibition in the Smith Gallery of the VAC.  In Book of Hours: A Litany Lyon presents four 
works thematically linked by her personal, catholic* interpretation of a medieval Book of Hours: a 
devotional book compiled for lay people which consisted of images for meditation.
         Three of the pieces in Lyon’s book represent an abstract, narrative style which she began 
developing in the Fall semester and which is admittedly influenced by the works of Eva Hesse and Louise 
Bourgeois.  Lyon often refers to these as her "skin" paintings.  Relics (seven small paintings), Sacre Coeur, 
and Sancta Camisa are stretcherless canvases upon which Lyon has painted, or rather, inscribed abstract, 
visual narratives of both physical and emotional abuse.  These canvases are thickly layered, skin-hued fields 
of color which are all cut or "wounded."  Some of the "wounds" remain open while others are stitched and 
sutured.  Lyon conceptualizes these works as meditations "on the narrative power of wounds, particularly 
women’s wounds."  
          Sancta Camisa (the chemise worn by the Virgin Mary as she gave birth to Christ) is a skin quilt, a 
collection of twenty-three scarred patches in which the body is clearly represented as text.  In the words of 
the artist, these wounds are the physical evidence of "crimes of sexual violence, and…the surgeries of 
mastectomy, hysterectomy, caesarian, and childbirth."  Although the work consists of signs of violence and 
pain, the compilation of these wounds and the loose narrative they construct are testaments to the 
transformative power of art.  This is a work of healing and a document of the process of healing, a little light 
conjured out of darkness.  Lyon expresses the necessity of bringing things to light, the empowerment and 
catharsis which communication and documentation often affords those who are oppressed and violated.
          Hours of the Virgin, the largest and most recent work in the exhibition, consists of nine triptychs 
which depict the development of a fetus and which are based on images of the infancy cycle of Christ 
represented in a Book of Hours.  Each triptych is a body to be opened up and examined.  For Lyon this 
work was a return to the figure (albeit a new variation) and the culmination of a long-time fascination with 
the process of child birth, the Annunciation, and religious iconography of pregnancy and birth.  In these nine 
triptychs, the importance of process, the meta-level, is foregrounded, as the pieces are documents of the 
most fundamentally human process of creation, birth.
          At the reception last Friday evening, a visitor to the Smith Gallery remarked that the works seem 
"very holistic."  This is one of Lyon’s remarkable achievements since the works draw from many different 
sources, which achieve a harmony through Lyon’s personal vision.  In their various stages of development, 
the triptychs revealed the influences of DaVinci’s sketches, medieval religious painting, and the pre-
Raphealites.  However, since the images are based largely on fiber-optic photographs, the work is also 
heavily influenced by technology and the privileged, contemporary gaze which technology affords us. The 
exterior panels of the triptychs are variations of the other skin paintings exhibited and thus lend a sense of 
thematic unity to the entire exhibition.
          With Book of Hours: A Litany Jenny Lyon creates an interactive environment of image and image as 
text, a book of general meditation on process, pain, and healing which she invites all to enter.  It is her intent 
to share her vision, not simply to have it and disregard her potential audience.  In Book of Hours, Lyon’s 
ability to skillfully render figures is harmonized effectively with thematic tropes common to most of her 
works and with her new departures into sculpture and abstract painting.  In this sense Book of Hours is the 
logical and successful culmination of Jenny Lyon’s artistic development in her four years at Davidson 
College. 
 
*The lower case "c’ is operative here, as the artist is evoking neither Catholic dogma nor the church but, 
rather, catholic meaning liberal and broad-minded.