Lunday’s paintings distort the boundaries between the real and the artificial to consider the constructions of relationships in a world informed by celebrity culture. Her figures are modeled on the endless cycle of celebrities from reality television, Instagram, and tabloids. Combining images from these sources with her own personal photographs, the artist focuses on the messy ethics of our instantly-famous culture to create tableaus of romantic engagement where genuine emotion is hidden behind precarious notions of selfhood and awkward moments of human interaction.

Using formal connections to art’s historical touchstones, Lunday calls attention to—or perhaps satirizes—our cultural obsession with celebrity while foregrounding what happens when the strange and familiar collide. In Lunday’s paintings, this ambiguity replaces the authenticity of interpersonal relationships and affords the viewer an opportunity to reflect upon the instability of desire.