While sick in bed with a kidney infection, Lettice Gatacre amused herself by drawing a bunny orgy—red, sinewy, delirious off-brand Bugs Bunnies entangled in a snake-like and Bacchanalian fucking ritual. She cites Bugs Bunny as her sexual awakening. In her words, he’s the “OG bad boy of the Looney Tunes squad.” Perversion, humor, adolescent irreverence—all common throughlines in Gatacre’s wide-spanning body of work, ranging from drawings to digital collage to sculptural installations. 

In the age of blackpilled cynicism (no, not the incel kind, the generally nihilistic kind) and digital information overload, Gatacre at once strives and struggles to maintain a childlike fascination with the world. The result is a collection of off-kilter creations that probe at our kawaii and nostalgia receptors while reminding us how deeply unsettling our current moment is. In “Shit the Lift,” a large plywood structure painted with a warped grid forms an ominous altarpiece, inviting viewers to peer into its dioramic insides with a red-carpet style strip of artificial grass. Stepping up, we find a green-lit enclosure for fruit animals: a bunny made of a gutted papaya, a fish-out-of-water carved out of a lemon. The scene is playful; it reminds us of playing with our food, or passé fake food in the storefront of a restaurant, or perhaps preposterous 1950s plating aesthetics. It also just so happens to remind us of our grim ecological future. Even with artificial intervention and biological modification, the fruit will still rot and the animals will still perish over the duration of the work’s exhibition. 

Impermanence is key to Gatacre’s sculptures, as her material interest lies in things that disintegrate, things considered lowly or unconventional, trash things. In “Can I Borrow Your Lighter,” four-fingered cartoon hands emerge from the wall to hold an acrylic case of water, lit from below with the same neon green light as in “Shit the Lift.” Within the case, a drawing of a dude lighting his cigarette on thin, crumpled paper floats vertically in the water. The trick is that the drawing has been made waterproof with a coating of aerogel, but even that only shields the paper from hydration for about a week, Gatacre says. She approaches light and liquid with the same philosophy in her work—both have leakages, both can flood a space, both can drown or soak or bathe an object, both qualify as mysterious phenomena that have long stupefied mankind. 

Gatacre doesn’t shy away from clever illusions, evident in her piece, “Art Is Hard But Loving You Is Easy.” The work is an ode to the contemporary mind as a cluttered desktop screen, a never-ending channel made possible by a two-way mirror burrowing deep into the earth, encased in an artificial rock as if it were an eternal fossil. The connection between such devices as the aerogel and the mirror and Gatacre’s interest in cartoon characters from the golden age of American animation lie in the fact that both seek to delight us by defying our typical understanding of the world. As Andy Holden adequately lays out in his seminal work, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, “It seems like anything can happen, yet, not anything can. There are rules that emerge as, over time, we begin to make observations.” Gatacre allows us moments to indulge in our imaginative fantasies, to live by our own set of cartoon physics, despite the persistent feeling of helplessness against oppressive structures much greater than us. In the end, Gatacre comforts us by letting us know it’s okay to revel in the absurdity of it all.