In The Court Of The Easter Queen

Family photos carry memories but also, inevitably, baggage. Terri Lloyd has found a way to deal with this baggage with an innate sense of whimsy and, ultimately, a resolve to make the imperfect enjoyable. Her ongoing series “In the Court of the Easter Queen” posits specific memories imbued with a clumsy magic, replacing wistfulness with the colorful pride of just having survived it all.

While Gerhard Richter spent the first half of his career rendering photographs as paintings to reveal their inherent unreality, Terri Lloyd abstracts from photography because the memories they carry are all too real. By composing figures without faces she connects to the awkward internal history all viewers carry. Within our intimate biographies, some things are too terrible to be confronted. The redemption here is the joy in seeing this miasma conquered through painting. When Terri Lloyd alters a bad memory, she does it for all of us.
—Mat Gleason