Lyons’s paintings result from extensive research, ranging from scientific phenomena to advertising and art history, as well as her personal experience with livestock and small-scale regenerative agriculture. They often take the form of historical painting and still life; Lyons’s interventions into these traditions complicate our definition of “animal” while interrogating the inner lives of non-human species, and our alienation from them. Lyons’s works frequently references the illustrations of naturalists to question how we tell complex, and at times, surreal stories of interspecies relationships. The paintings of 19th-century Austrian Aloys Zötl and the Dutch pharmacist-zoologist Albertus Seba exist within a continuum of fables about animals in everyday life, and how they have been exiled from it. Lyons’s work suggests that animals are essential to material culture, and her recourse to history highlights the dangers of the ongoing destruction of wildlife.

The exhibition’s title Full Earth expresses themes of abundance and connection, as well as the perseverance of nature. And Lyons’s subjects tell complex stories. Crocodiles, a long-standing preoccupation for the artist, created from memory, often stir awareness of deep-time. Lyons evokes, for instance, Tick-Tock the Crocodile from Disney’s 1953 animated film Peter Pan, as a symbol of both time and mortality. Volcanoes, depicted in a number of the works, emphasize the evolving landscapes of our planet beyond the scope of human perception. To inspire tourism, Florida’s Rhesus macaques were transported overseas to a small island in the Silver River, but the capable swimmers escaped and quickly established thriving colonies. For Lyons, these monkeys pose questions of control, commodification and nature’s unwillingness to be defined. A touchpoint for Lyons in these paintings is the writings of seminal Everglades conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The artist was struck by Douglas’s poetic, complicated descriptions of Florida, which reflected Lyons’s own memories of and engagement with this region and its landscape. She cites of Douglas:

[H]istory, the recorded time of the earth of man, is in itself something like a river. To try to present it whole is to find oneself lost in the sense of time and space, and the end is the future and the unknown. What we can know lies somewhere between the course along which for a little way one proceeds, the changing life, the varying light, must somehow be fixed in a moment clearly, from which one may look before and after and try to comprehend wholeness. So it is with the Everglades, which have that quality of long existence in their own nature. They were changeless. They were changed. They were complete before man came to them, and for centuries afterward, when he was only one of those forms which shared, in a finely balanced harmony, the forces and ancient nature of the place.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 1947

Kat Lyons: Full Earth is organized by Marquez Art Projects and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, curatorial adviser for MAP and Artistic Director of ICA Miami.