LESLEY ART + DESIGN
MFA IN VISUAL ARTS CANDIDATE
A singular word that kept emerging throughout my SUFA20 residency was ‘excavate’. We associate this word with digging up something from below the surface, but what does it mean in terms of my art practice? What does it mean to be an artist as an excavator? What happens when I prioritize excavation over painting, drawing, printmaking, or other traditional fine art mediums? Over the years, an additive and subtractive process developed in my practice. During this semester, I am flipping the sequence (subtractive first, then additive), exploring materiality, palette, and scale, and questioning the physical object versus conceptual motive. How long and how deep can I ‘dig’ in my work until the work deteriorates? How can I embed information into my process to express fragility? When the underbelly of the work is exposed, what new meanings transpire? Making these changes in my method will disrupt the formula I have previously established, and will generate new outcomes and create new meaning. Additionally, I am borrowing printmaking techniques and vocabulary and applying it to my work to generate a new language; my foundation/undergraduate work was in printmaking.
to be continued...
FALL 2020 INDEPENDENT STUDIO
ONGOING THOUGHTS
SUMMER 2020 RESIDENCY
The following statement and body of work were used to apply to the program and were presented during the first residency.
The impetus to create started as a need to feel the materials with my bare hands and to discover what they were capable of doing. As an inquisitive child, exploring art was a natural process, yet it remained at the superficial level only touching the aesthetic side of creativity through collage techniques, craft, and mark-making. As my life progressed, I was faced with many hardships, and my work began to shift to a deeper, darker investigation of identity, self-worth, perception, and healing. I explore the intersection between my internal energy and the external influences that have percolated throughout my life by creating mixed-media abstract pieces with or without figurative graphite drawings. My work satisfies an innate desire to physically feel the materials while communicating vulnerability. The main theme that is prevalent throughout my work is fragility. I have faced much adversity and trauma throughout my life, and it is consistently explored through an intuitive, fluid process. Over a decade ago, I left a volatile world to navigate the world as a young, single mother. At the core, my work is the visual record of the many fragments surrounding my story. My most recent body of work combines mixed-media abstraction on wood panels. My pieces tend to be somber in mood and touched with the muted overcast tones from my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Chance dictates my process, and the work grows as I react to the formation of shapes, negative spaces, and textures. I prepare wood panels with a mixture of gesso, acrylic ink, and stain. After establishing the groundwork, I build up several layers with an array of materials including, but never limited to, tissue paper, transfer paper, gouache, acrylic, gold leaf, oil stick, and graphite stick. I then deconstruct the work by sanding and/or scraping away areas to expose the underbelly of the piece. This process repeats as much as it needs to until the work effectively communicates fragility and tension; there is chaos and order in each piece. Life is a series of layers being built on top of each other, but the foundation and history is too significant to ignore and mask. There is beauty in the past despite how ugly it is because the present and future were built upon it. My goal is to mimic the trials and tribulations of life through my art while exposing hope and beauty that may have been hidden within.
AARYN LEE - 2020
