Laurie Nye: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

Uffner & Liu is pleased to present The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Laurie Nye’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, in which she furthers her deeply personal vernacular of lushly painted homages to natural forces, beings, and phenomena. Comprised of 12 oil paintings on linen, they activate the medium of painting as both protest and antidote, becoming transformative portals that ignite our collective agency to protect the natural world—and each other.

Completed over the course of the last year, first at home in Los Angeles and while an artist-in-residence in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the paintings are rooted in the lived and imagined experience of both time and place. Calling to mind the painterly concerns of the Nabis and drawing from Nye’s background in textiles, their purposeful flatness upends our understanding of linear time and Euclidean space. Nye gives us soft, almost smiling flora, which hover on equal planes with clouds, racing stars, and hovering moons. They beckon us into dream-like visions populated by hummingbird moths, butterflies, daturas, batmoons, woodpeckers, and owls.

Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Nye references the mythological underpinnings of her Southern roots as source material. The show’s title, and the eponymous painting within it, come from fellow Memphian Frank Stanford’s 1978 epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a sprawling work investigating myth and memory. Nye, Stanford’s compatriot in this distinctly Southern tradition of myth-telling, transforms the two-dimensional plane into swirling, potent mises en scène fighting to rebalance the natural world.

In both The Astral Plane, for Late at Night and the show’s title painting, triumphant cadres of winged night creatures charge upward, powered by the rays of the setting sun in a desert landscape, rocketing themselves to their nighttime occupations amidst a cosmos of shooting stars. Nature dominates here: it’s a world devoid of humans, where coexistence is the norm. Nye’s deft line and brushwork form nurturing containers for repeated motifs, each in protoplasmic-like suspension that protects them as they gestate, or preserves them from the encroachment of outside forces.

Trees appear frequently as both anchors and connectors from the earth to the sky. In Cottonwood, a portrait of the majestic tree in the garden of Nye’s temporary home in Albuquerque, bold, vertical lines shoot upward as the tree blooms into its powers with the coming of spring; the golden ochres and pale yellows mirror the sun-filled hues of these clusters of blooms. In Healing Pt 1, the deep magenta lines of the tree trunk guide us up the right side of the painting where branches spill out like the loving arms of a mother, providing cover to the flowers, butterflies, bats, and delicate spiderwebs. In Tarot Tree and A Few Less Flowers Under the Moon, the force of Nye’s trees reaches so high they manage to kiss the cosmos. In The Magic Flute, flora and fauna commingle in soft washes of pink, orange, blue, and lavender, encircled by the roots and branches of a tree. Following the labyrinthine path of this line work, we are met by an owl sitting atop a branch, as if patiently expecting us. In Nye’s words, the owl acts as a “guide of the night”—a messenger of natural wisdom.

You can’t own the skies, these creature guides seem to be telling us. Lovingly watched over by crescent moons, these are forcefields of natural elements working in tandem. Nye improvises with color and line to create a vibrational tension that underscores the presence of the human touch. Light washy layers, smudges, scumbles, and impasto become visual oracles, akin to prehistoric cave drawings.

We are all made of star stuff, it is true. In creating a prophetic record of the fragility of our shared existence—and the natural world we stand to lose—Nye asks for a kind of cosmic justice. She advocates for a universe in which love, harmony, peace, and the wisdom that all living beings share can continue to coexist in ecstatic displays.

–– Megan Reed

“all of this / is magic against death / all of this ends / with to be continued” —Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

Laurie Nye (b. 1972, Memphis, TN) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2002 and her BFA from the Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN in 1995. Nye has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023, 2021); Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (2022); Odd Ark LA, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Big Pictures LA, Los Angeles, CA (2019); and The Pit, Glendale, CA (2018). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Uffner & Liu, New York, NY (2025); Harpers, East Hampton, NY (2025); Miles McEnery Gallery (2025); The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2023, 2022); Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023, 2022); Modern Art, London, United Kingdom (2023); and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany (2022). Nye’s work has been reviewed in such publications as Artillery, Los Angeles Times, Artforum, FAD Magazine and LA Weekly. Her work is included in the OZ Art Northwest Arkansas collection (Bentonville, AR). Laurie Nye lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.