Lisa Co Solo Exhibition
CICA Museum, Flexspace Section C
June 18 – 29, 2025
2025.6.18 – 29
The Magician’s Daughter
My art practice explores how books and prints act as emotional objects and vehicles for narrative. The content of my work is deeply shaped by the dual influences of my Southern and Filipino heritages. Rather than telling a specific story, the imagery gestures toward a kind of folkloric magic—one that resists resolution and instead invites reflection. I often think of this process as an act of deconstruction and reassembly; I dissect visual and emotional fragments to reconfigure them into something that feels intimate but mutable, deeply felt and familiar yet not fixed—something that can transform or be reinterpreted over time. This process driven work deals with memory, identity, and narrative in a non-linear, fragmented, or evolving way. With this in mind, I make things that can be experienced as wholes or in pieces, that repeat themselves and that feel simultaneously like remembering and forgetting. I am constantly inspired by folk stories of ghosts, monsters and otherness told to me as a child by my late father. These themes emerge not through direct illustration, but through a layered, intuitive exploration of what it means to belong, to feel absence, and to endure change. In this exhibition, The Magician’s Daughter, my work explores visual storytelling – treating prints and individual imagery as pieces of a larger narrative. My work is rooted in the tactile, layered process of printmaking, using woodcuts, monoprints, and linocuts to build a rich vocabulary of imagery. I collage these elements together to create prints, books and large-scale paper installations that explore the intersection of the abstract and the representational. Central to my visual language are fragmented interpretations of natural elements—water, wood, and sky—rendered in abstract forms that evoke both landscape and emotion. Interwoven with these are more surreal, symbolic images: disjointed body parts, haunting glimpses of domestic interiors. These forms suggest a narrative presence, one that is emotionally charged yet deliberately unresolved. The resulting work is meant to hold space for contradiction—comfort interlaced with heartache, presence shadowed by absence. Drawing on folkloric motifs and magical realism, my imagery gestures toward a loosely woven narrative. This visual storytelling is not literal but atmospheric, influenced by the mysticism of Southern Gothic traditions and the layered cultural memory of the Southeast Asian diaspora. Through collage, I piece together a world that feels both familiar and dislocated—echoing the ways memory, heritage, and longing form a kind of personal mythos. Each composition invites the viewer to enter a space of ambiguity, where meaning is felt more than defined.
Lisa Co is an artist, printmaker and bookmaker from the Southeast coast of the United States. Originally from Georgia, she currently resides in Florida and works as Assistant Professor of Art at Florida Gateway College. She earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Armstrong State University and her Master’s in Studio Art from Florida State University. Her continued practice focuses on interests in metaphors for personal memory and emotion. Guided by poetic imagery and a tactile relationship to materials, she creates visual narratives that blur the line between abstraction and surreal representation. Water, wood, and sky appear in abstracted, gestural forms, while more figurative images—disjointed body parts, domestic interiors—evoke a sense of familiarity tinged with unease.
