Lance Turner

Lance Turner was born in Morganton, North Carolina in 1985. He graduated from Memphis College of Art with a BFA in Painting and Art History in 2007, and a MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012.

Lance Turner’s work from 2017 to 2026 shifts from dense visual puzzles to layered, semi-fictionalized nature scenes. Despite changes in subject matter, several core threads unify his practice. A central concern is how easily meaning, truth, and authenticity can be manipulated or distorted. By Quilt Painting (2020), this evolves into an exploration of unreadable text strings, showing how seemingly objective systems—like computer code or mathematics—can be hijacked to deliver subjective statements, political or otherwise.

Turner consistently dismantles the notion that a painting or photograph represents absolute reality. Instead, he foregrounds the “inherently falsifying” nature of visual reproduction. In Nightfall (2025), he explicitly rejects the 1960s photorealist belief that a photo-based image is “real.” He manipulates depth of field, backlighting, and horizon lines to emphasize the artificiality of painted space, comparing his manual grid-and-translation process to the way neural networks and AI repeatedly modify data to fabricate a sense of realism.

Turner engages deeply with linguistic and mathematical theory, using Alan Turing’s mathematical certainty to counter Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist claim that words lack fixed meaning. He describes his work as a critique of post-structuralism, arguing that while language loops can collapse into subjective knots, an objective framework for human communication must—and does—exist. He advocates for an objective look at the world, grounding his later work in tangible, lived experience.

To counter the exhaustion of a media landscape designed to manipulate thought, Turner uses personal, unmediated reality as a creative anchor. In a 2016 body of work, made amid a crisis of truth, he notes that straightforward photographs of him skateboarding with friends “speak for themselves.” By 2025, this desire for the unmanipulated drives him into nature. He turns to painting the flora and fauna of his surroundings in Black Mountain because, as he writes, “nature is neutral.”

Across this nine-year snapshot, Turner’s work shifts from analyzing the mechanics of deception through cultural and philosophical theory to seeking remedies for it. He moves from complex, anxiety-inducing theoretical loops to a maximalist, deeply labored study of the natural world, using painting to process, reconstruct, and ultimately reclaim a sense of objective reality.