Lindsey Lascaux wants to decode depression. Approaching the visual world as ciphers generated by networks of symbolic power, Lascaux’s practice investigates the personal and political elements of her experiences with what doctors have diagnosed as varying mental illnesses––with the tongue-in-cheek hope that creating a riddle out of existential dramas might make them solvable, and even offer us all some salvation. In her paintings, digital work, and time-based media, misremembered symbols of decades long past collide with the flames of imagined end times. Drawing on cultural-historical research at the intersection of psychiatry, spirituality, and technology, Lascaux diagrams pseudo-nostalgic motifs of fantasy and doom, juxtaposing the anodyne with the disquieting to decrypt (and re-encipher) the grandiose absurdity of terminal sadness. Lascaux begins each painting by 3D modeling impossible scenes from scratch with physically correct lighting, using these renderings as reference photos for a painstaking application of acrylic glaze, emulating styles from that of Flemish history painting to the light-dappled gouache of early Disney production backgrounds.