My work is an exploration of how our everyday experiences of one another are steeped in grief. I construct lenses through which the viewer interprets images of both people and stand-ins for people. Feelings of something missing and not-quite-right stir the viewer to sit with the ordinary in new ways.
We as humans are helplessly social and categorical; It is our nature to place ourselves within frameworks upheld by our social experience. And yet, due to the same forces, we reject those frameworks when they do not serve us a consistent and satisfactory sense of self and meaning. Nothing expresses this fight within ourselves to such a degree as our preoccupancy with living and dying. Grappling with the notion that it is equally human to live as it is to die is what drives my work: not the despair of dying, but rather the understanding that the cost of love is loss.
My work posits itself as practical rather than morbid. It stands as a testament to accepting the transaction of loss for love. Fear is not the aim, but instead unease; there is a sensitive boundary of uncertainty that comes with our inevitability. My work directs the viewers’ attention to the frailty of our most steadfast.
Rebecca Lugo is a primarily 2D-focused artist from Chicagoland, currently based in Indianapolis. She is pursuing a degree in Mathematics after a hiatus from school during COVID. Lugo is passionate that artistic and mathematical endeavors are both creatively motivated, and that both require innovative and analytical thinking.
Lugo’s early art education was focused on figure drawing, which has shaped her interests and skills through the present. She developed a deep interest in the human form as well as utilizing line to describe real-world objects with sensibility and consideration, rather than to explicitly relay imagery with accuracy.
While at Indiana University, she received the Fine Arts Award, Second Prize, from the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (OVPUE). Lugo’s piece, Proofs (2018), can be seen on display at Wells Library as part of the university’s permanent collection.
During her time in Indianapolis, Rebecca Lugo has shown work at two shows with Celestial Creative Collective (formerly Celestial Arts & Antiques), “Venus Awakening” (March 2022) and “Debriefing Grief” (September 2022).
She is inspired by the following artists and their methods of imagemaking: Paul Coldwell, Edgar Degas, Francisco Goya, Lucian Freud, Kathe Kollwitz, Fred Dalkey, and Laura Post.
Rebecca Lugo 