Circle Games
From Gambit Magazine, New Orleans, November, 1998
D. Eric Bookhardt
"Cycles, circles and wheels also play an important role in Lory Lockwood's BIKES AND BABES show at Sylvia Schmidt. A colorful series of photoreal paintings depicting motorcyles and their riders, Lockwood's BIKES resonate all of the charged symbolic icons that they are. They also are as complex as the convoluted surfaces Lockwood replicates.
BIKER CHIC is a study in surface contrasts. Here, the image is closely cropped so all we see of the bike is a maze of orange and chrome reflections off the gas tank, the frame, a helmet resting on the seat, and a crimson-red motorcycle jacket hanging demurely from the handle bar. The colors are bright-like acrylics, and the gradation of tones suggests airbrush, yet the image is a traditional oil painting. These illusory surface effects, combined with the female orientation, give BIKER CHIC a complicated aura of subversive allure and contradictory expectations.
Yet subversive allure is what bikes were always about: the rush of the elements, a sense of flying, of escape from ordinary existence. So Lockwood's bikes reflect an allusion to (or illusion of) liberation. Her riders look relaxed, ready to embark, although their destination may not yet be known -- at least not until the next show."
