Leslie Shows
dal 18/4/2008 al 14/5/2008
Segnalato da
18/4/2008
Leslie Shows
Jack Hanley, Los Angeles
The New Dust. Painting, collage and drawing. In the artist's words, her latest work "comes out of a constellation of ideas around landscape painting, self-organizing matter, and the view of 'things' as aggregates.".
The Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of Leslie Shows, titled The New Dust, including painting, collage and drawing.
In the artist’s words, her latest work “comes out of a constellation of ideas around landscape painting, self-organizing matter, and the view of ‘things’ as aggregates. While these are for the most part landscapes, I am interested in the matter that constitutes the ground, and how it relates to human bodies and culture. I want to show matter as the principle actor, whether it’s as gold coursing through economies or teeth, or charcoal and pigment depicting dirt and mud.”
“In many of the pieces, I employ materials-as-themselves (paper scraps, text, rust, charcoal) and images (photographs of dust bunnies, a print of a brushstroke) to depict erosion, flow, oxidization, crystallization—they are collages not only of materials but of modes of representation.”
Echoing Robert Smithson’s statement that “vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books,” her paintings and collages assemble heterogeneous elements to evoke fragments of former worlds. To Shows, relations between stratifications in rocks, flows of culture, or layers of thought go beyond metaphorical associations to become identical mechanisms in different spheres. Reflection and symmetry, and references to dissolution and stability—most pregnant in her “Black Icebergs” series—also remind us of the precarious thrill of being alive.
Leslie Shows is a recipient the SECA Art Award, 2006. She has shown her work at SFMOMA, the California Biennial at OCMA, the Oakland Museum of California, Art Nova at Art Basel Miami, the Jack Hanley Gallery San Francisco and the Adobe Books Backroom, among other places.
Image: © Leslie Shows Ink Iceberg (blue), 2008 collage and ink on paper 26 x 39 inches
Opening reception: Saturday, April 19, 7-9pm
Jack Hanley
945 Sun Mun Way - Los Angeles