HABITAT: Painter Mira Dancy in Her Brooklyn Studio

Women lounge, pose, and, more than anything else, stare you down with insouciant confidence in Mira Dancy’s paintings. These models are often nude, and they always inhabit resplendently colored environments, surrounded by slashes and planes of raspberry, cranberry, blueberry. Her works have the potent immediacy of good neon—a material that the Columbia M.F.A. graduate sometimes works in, as it happens. “I do get obsessed with thinking about the galleries or the museum as a physical site,” Dancy says in this video, directed by artist Robin Cameron and filmmaker Wilson Cameron and produced by the Standard. To wit, she sometimes paints directly on gallery walls, her acrylics flowing elegantly across corners, as in a sprawling mural she made for the 2015 Greater New York quinquennial at MoMA PS1. Last year, Dancy, who is based in Brooklyn, had a solo show at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. One half of her latest two-venue exhibition on New York’s Lower East Side is now open at Chapter NY, with the second half opening on May 5 at 83 Pitt Street.