Lesley Heller Workspace Announces September Exhibitions

Lesley Heller Workspace has announced the openings for the September exhibitions!

Cullen Washington Jr: Od Matter
September 6 - October 22, 2017
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 6, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, October 21, 2:30pm

Lesley Heller is pleased to present Cullen Washington Jr.'s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Nature and the spirit are the impetus for Washington's new body of work. Not nature as scene or sublime scape, but nature in its fundamental form as matter, and the spirit as the force which creates it. In this exhibition entitled, Od Matter (Od is a deity that pervades all nature and manifest itself in magnetism, chemical action and mesmerism), Washington employs non-representational abstraction in an effort to understand order, chaos, creation and human connection.

The work is made by making inked impressions of collage paintings. The paintings are created using detritus, tape, paper and studio cast offs. Washington blackens the combined elements and charges them with a new sense of life as a collagraph. In an alchemic act, the paintings' patterns and structures are transformed into a new topographical language on the papers' surface. Washington then seamlessly draws and collages additional elements. For Washington, this process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction reflects the many proposals and possibilities found in nature.

Od Matter features eight collagraph works which explore the seen and the unseen, the individual and the indivisible. In a world of data-dentites and troubling socio-political times, Washington's works act as metaphors for broader realities and underlying universal connections where differences of race, creed and gender are displaced in favor of unity and a singular pluralism.

Cullen Washington Jr. (b. 1972, Alexandria, Louisiana) earned his MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and BFA from Louisiana State University. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; Saatchi Gallery in London, UK; and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. He has been artist in residence at Amherst College (2016-17), the Fountainhead Residency (2016),The Studio Museum in Harlem (2013); Rush Arts Gallery (2012), Yaddo (2011), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). He is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2009) and a Bartlett and Montague Travel Grant (2008). His work has been written about in Art: 21 Magazine, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, The Boston Globe, and Art New England. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections including the Studio Museum, Charles Saatchi Gallery, and the Alexandria Museum of Art, Louisiana. Cullen Washington Jr lives and works in New York City.

Dana Melamed: Waves of Discourse
September 6 - October 22, 2017
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 6, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, October 7, 2:30pm

Lesley Heller is pleased to present Dana Melamed: Waves of Discourse, the artists' second solo exhibition with the gallery. Melamed's three-dimensional assemblage works explore the power struggle between humanity and nature. This narrative comes forth in her drawings and sculptures-both wall mounted and free standing-where graphic elements akin to urban topography, form intricate, chaotic, and complex spaces.

Melamed composes her work layer upon layer, fusing scratched patches of foil, paper, wood, found industrial objects, and wire onto aluminum mesh. The integration results in an irregular surface that is rugged yet fragile. The sense of nature reclaiming the man made is conveyed in the work through their heavily stressed surfaces which transform into apparent decayed ruins. Citing references and influence from Piranesi's etchings, Goya's The Disasters of War and Anselm Kiefer's deteriorating landscapes, her sculptures become abstracted depictions of fictional deserted cities which have turned into wastelands.

Dana Melamed (b. 1972, Tel Aviv, Israel) studied architecture and art history at Ort Technicum Givatayim, Israel (1990) and attended the Vital Tel Aviv visual art school (1995). Her works have been exhibited in museums like the National Academy in Manhattan, the Neuberger Museum in Purchase NY and Hunterdon Museum in NJ, the Durst Organization in NY, as well as leading galleries in the USA & Europe. She has works in the Frenkels Foundation for the Arts' permanent collection and the University of Michigan Museum's permanent collection, the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, as well as numerous international private collections. Dana Melamed is based in New York City.

Soft Power
Sarah E. Brook, Maria Hupfield, Lizzie Scott, Jayoung Yoon
Curated by Katya Grokhovsky

September 6 - October 22, 2017
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 6, 6-8pm
Performance by Maria Hupfield: Sunday, October 22, 3pm

Soft Power is a group exhibition which explores notions of human condition and power dynamics through the use of hand manipulation of "soft" malleable materials such as felt, fabric, canvas and human hair. The artworks include sculptural objects, wall hangings, canvas constructions and performance. United by their use of soft materials and the handmade, each artist uniquely activates their own space of inquiry, evoking their own relationship to place, body, space and time.

Sarah E. Brook searches for an internal state in relation to place. Inspired by her upbringing in the Nevada high-desert, she juxtaposes the psychological impact of a vast landscape to the current rapid digital age via manipulation and assembling of materials such as sand paper and canvas. Her sculpturally inclined wall hanging objects act as windows into abstracted distant places; or as fragments of half-remembered lucid dreams.

Maria Hupfield, a member of the Anishinaabe Nation at Wasauksing First Nation (Ontario, Canada), works in performance and sculpture, intervening into space with hand sewn body-objects made from industrial felt-which act as invitations to activate, converse, and to locate one's body in relation to one's self. These sculptures are carried either on or off the body, evoking new meanings and engaging our senses.

Lizzie Scott's sewn and painted fabric constructions defy definition. Oscillating between sculpture and painting, her works protrude off the wall in geometric formations, extending the boundaries of painting into physical space. Investigating the everyday world through color and form, Scott's work explores the infinite possibilities of the dimensions of reality.

Jayoung Yoon uses human hair in her work as an intersection between the physical and spiritual dimension. Engaging the material as a form of post-corporeal metaphor of time, Yoon employs her own sheared hair as a symbol. A stand-in for the body, the hair is painstakingly woven into objects and sculptures through abstracted forms representing patterns of thought.