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Lance Letscher: Newly Industrious Lance Letscher: Newly Industrious By Madeline Irvine Over the years, Lance Letscher's work has become richer and more mysterious. "Industry and Design," the current exhibition of his work at D Berman Gallery, signals new shifts in the collages for which he has gained national notoriety. Some are much thicker and meatier, adding a sculptural depth to the work. And Letscher, a self-described colorist, takes color to a whole new level here: deep and rich and thoroughly satisfying. Combining the illusions of depth created by the color-play with the real spatial depth of the bas-relief brings new layers to art that is created out of reused, printed, drawn, or bound papers that are old enough to be called historical. In addition to Letscher's abstractions, we see new imagery depicted in simple, blocky forms, mixed with fragments of children's artwork. Even at its most enigmatic, Letscher's work engages the mind and eye. Here, Letscher answers questions about new paths in his work. Austin Chronicle: Why the exhibition title "Industry and Design"? Lance Letscher: That is a reference to my studio practice and mindset right now: industry in the sense that work is being industrious and design in the sense of formally making design decisions. One of the stronger themes throughout the work is construction ... making buildings, and industry in the sense of manufacturing – there are factories and references to robots. There is a thread that goes through the show that is about mechanization and industry. AC: Yet when we imagine state-of-the-art factories and robots today, they are so different from what you picture. Your imagery is drawn from a different era. LL: It is more of a storybook perspective. AC: Tell me about that perspective. The imagery recalls childhood: fragments of children's drawings and coloring books and toy boxes from the first half of the 20th century. LL: I kind of drifted into that mode. One thing that influenced that is the commission I did for the children's hospital [Dell Children's Medical Center]. I started thinking about kids as my audience. It started to influence the vocabulary I was using. AC: There are other shifts in the work. For one, you have much more recognizable imagery: blocky house forms ... LL: The images are not representational; they are just cues. If I made a picture of a house with a tree in the front yard and I meant to picture that, then it would be representational. In this case, they function more as associative cues, and they are meant to be read in context with everything else in the picture plane, the marks and scribbles and little words. And that's my strategy: to create an abstract or emotional or psychological space. The bottom line about my work, and this work in particular, is that it is a form of expressionism. What I am really after is the momentum, the emotional mo-mentum that is built up as you move from one image to the next, not just in one piece but as you move from one piece to another in the show. AC: I was surprised to find serious themes in the language of childhood, for example, Train and Tunnel, recalling the Holocaust. LL: The Holocaust has been a focus of my reading since my early 20s. In this show, the relationship to the Holocaust was about mechanization and turning the genocide into an industry. I tried to make them as light as I could, to make it a storybook image or a dream image by using bright colors and drawings made from Crayolas. AC: Why did you do that? LL: If a kindergartner were told about it by his parents, what kind of images would you generate? You wouldn't generate black-and-white, grainy photographs. One thing that I have been thinking about a lot is how children process suffering and images about suffering. I think it is an odd mix of accurate clarity, very in-the-moment experience, and a distancing, a detachment, something that is more akin to fantasy, telling themselves stories about it. Lance Letscher: "Industry and Design" is on view through June 28 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe. For more information, call 477-8877 or visit www.dbermangallery.com. |
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Jim Torok: Life Is Good By Rachel Cook Jim Torok's current show at Lora Reynolds is filled with slogans that also appear in the aisles of the self-help section at your local bookstore. "You Are Good," "Have Faith in Your Self," "Life Is Good," "You Are Perfect," "Do Not Be Too Afraid," "Be Yourself," and "You Are Really Great" surround you in the main space of the gallery as if to give you this sense of relief when it really creates this forced sense of encouragement. Torok's cartoon figures, loosely painted on rice paper, don't really make you think, "Life Is Good," as the exhibition title suggests; most humans need continuous reassurance to make that statement true. But though I don't believe the artist's drawings are intended to sway the viewer into believing the statements they present, I like the manner in which they are presented. Each drawing has cartoon figures similar to the round ball that bounces around in the Zoloft commercial, except that these figures have more facial features (including long, floppy noses) and seem more authentic, instead of something fabricated by a pharmaceutical company. The cartoonlike figures are also reminiscent of David Shrigley's humorous but disturbing black-and-white animations or his instructional drawings. Shrigley uses his figures to describe something slightly more obscure and a bit disturbing, and each animation leaves the viewer hanging slightly because nothing gets resolved. In addition to the cartoonlike figures, Torok uses instructional text within each piece, making them resemble the posters in your doctor's office that tell you to eat well and exercise. The text is placed across the top of the paper, with either flowers or a smiley face underneath the reassuring slogan. The rest of the show includes two types of paintings: storyboard cartoon narratives, each with a slogan at the top, and portraits of Torok's peers. The latter, rendered in 5-inch-by-4-inch squares, are very detailed, and the people in the paintings really do resemble their subjects. Performance artist and current UT faculty member Mike Smith is drawn to a T, with his dopey, sullen expression and every hair sitting so perfectly still on his head. Torok has maintained these seemingly disparate bodies of work for quite some time, but how they come from the same person is puzzling at first. Torok's personality does not seem to provoke any thoughts concerning split personalities, yet both bodies of work reveal aspects of the same artist's life. The cartoonlike or abstract images reveal the process of the artist struggling in his construction of an idealized self – the image that each individual builds of the life he or she would like or should be in order to be acceptable. Torok uses two contrasting artistic techniques (abstraction/realism) to illustrate the vantage points of his life and his constructed self. The idealized self is a romanticized portrait built on exaggerated self-expectations, but since the intimate, realistic portraits portray some of Torok's actual peers and friends, in a way their presence makes his abstract constructions become more real. |
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Lance Letscher: 'Industry and Design' By Nikki Moore Dumb Luck. It's the title of one of Lance Letscher's latest works, a title that is redundant in the most clever ways – as is the piece itself. Drawing on this exhibition's penchant for amazing lines, appearing throughout D Berman Gallery in pencil, crayon, and collage, Dumb Luck might be a tracing of any man's daily walking path as seen from the air. It might be the mapping of a train of thought, or it might be, as a snippet in the upper left corner suggests, a random game of picture and story – something like life laid out in collage form. But be it path, picture, or point of thought, as Letscher's title makes plain, it is also only ever Dumb Luck. Interestingly, the show's theme is all that we as humans have in our toolbox to defy dumb luck. "Industry and Design" is a step off from Letscher's previous work. While at first glance the work appears to be thicker, meatier, the truth may be that these works invite openness in a way that his previous collections, while stunning, did not. The works' colors stand out differently against more neutral backgrounds, and in the current, almost stair-step difference between paper background and book-cover foreground, the materiality of Letscher's media is more noticeable. Perhaps this is in keeping with the pictures and stories that "Industry and Design" evokes: children's thoughts fleshed out in squiggly lines, feet that don't fit the size of their bodies, scribbles that seem to come out of nowhere. In close contrast, some of Letscher's own pencil drawings have made their way into the collection. These careful measured studies in dark, layered lead complete the story told by the children's early work. And work is certainly the question here. Throughout both the formal elements and the suggestive narratives that the artist strings throughout this group of collages, there is always the question of work: how children work through ideas and emotions and how adults, on a larger, possibly grander and more sublime scale, work through those very same ideas and emotions in supposedly grownup form. The answer may be "dumb luck," but as we are accustomed to calling such luck "talent" in many cases, the term seems all the more apt to describe Letscher's work in this exhibition. |
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