From 2009 - 2011, primarily when a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Lonegan began developing a process of making work out of consecutively dried thin layers of oil paint. Each layer was applied with a metal tool, in an attempt to address lingering questions about authorship and belief that the generation of painters before her tried to solve through attitude or by avoiding aesthetic properties that were previously deemed generous. No tape or other means of measuring devices were used to restrict the appearance, beyond the performance of the act that create each layer. The only lines that emerged were those that emerged out of the enacted steps of its making: from a removal of paint that would result from a scraping of a tool against bars and other objects placed behind the deliberately loosely stretched canvas, or from the results of drying time. Influenced primarily by strategies of printmaking, a strict procedure was followed so as to exploit the properties of resists and other physical incidents, so that consecutive layers of oil paint would stick only to certain areas of the picture plane, leading to the development of a picture in reverse.

The images that emerge are seemingly banal and familiar, with small blips and inconsistencies resulting from the unusual process. The work calls for a slow reading, and the contingency of meaning that results from making paintings whose aesthetics and imagery were determined by investigating a set of thoughts and questions insists upon a consideration of the context, source material, and backstory for further clues to the values generating the work. Following the precedents on one hand, of Charlene Von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen and Mary Heilman, and on the other, of R.H. Quaytman, Laura Owens, and her teachers Lari Pittman, James Welling, Andrea Fraser and Mary Kelly, this body of work conflates an approach often associated with a 'coolness', a set of soft edged aesthetics and embrace of a wide range of colors previously associated with a notion of painterly generosity, and insists upon approaching a body of work as a conceptual project. It insists on exploring and using a charged set of aesthetics, and working in between modes of series and seriality, installation and discrete objects demonstrates a commitment to explore the contingency of meaning that arises with physical language.

This body of work was awarded a grant by the Joan Mitchell Foundation and displayed at ACME. Los Angeles, in 2010.