Lesley Heller Workspace Exhibits Climb the Black Mont & New Monuments

The Lesley Heller Workspace presents 'Climb the Black Mountain,' a collection of recent work by Elisabeth Condon and 'New Monuments,' featuring work by Liz Atzberger, Jesse Bercowetz, Ben Godward, Audrey Hasen Russell, and Letha Wilson, April 13 through May 15. Opening reception is April 13, from 6-8 p.m.

Elisabeth Condon's new paintings introduce the randomness of poured paint into the measured aesthetic of Chinese scrolls and sketchbook drawings of her travels around the world. Collectively entitled 'Climb the Black Mountain,' the paintings redefine place as a unifying concept rather than a locality -- a mental projection of overlaid and overlapping locations, past and present. Reconfigured into hybrid combinations of abstract and recognizable, Condon's landscapes heed the Chinese principle that landscape synthesizes memory and experience in the rhythmic, visual conveyance of internal and external perceptions. Conflating influences as diverse as the writings of the American Beat poets, the musical compositional form known as "fantasia," and Taoist philosophy, Condon's compositions pay tribute to the layered memories and impressions that travel and nomadism create in the landscape of the consciousness.

Condon divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and Tampa, Florida, where she is Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. Condon is the recipient of many awards and honors including a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant; a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship; and residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Fountainhead, Miami, FL; Red Gate, Beijing, China; and Loft Nota Bene, Cadaques, Spain.

'New Monuments,' curator and sculptor Ben Godward has assembled a group of artists who upend traditional notions of landscape and sculpture, working toward a new set of rules that incorporates the use of industrial discards, construction materials, recyclables and other relics of castoff culture, as well as more traditional media used in non-traditional ways. As the exhibition title suggests, the works shown here are both new and monumental, with an attitude toward the cherished institutions of past practice that is irreverent, but stops short of disrespect or outright dismissal.

Godward describes his own works as "reflections of myself, contradictory and impulsive." He commands a jarringly bright palette of sometimes painfully contrasting colors that evoke cartoonish excesses of emotion and exuberance, with an undertone of unease -- toxic orange, crime-scene-tape yellow, biohazard red. His unregulated forms underscore this sense of instability, both joyful and dangerous; they are the forms of friendly comic-book caricatures, but also call to mind the swelling randomness of mutation, decay, and disease.

Like Godward, Jesse Bercowetz creates sculptures that contain strong elements of chaos and discord. Often working at room-scale, he assembles debris, thrift-store finds and street trash to create sculptures that capture the unease and paranoia of modern life. In a similar vein, Liz Atzberger uses the brightly colored detritus of modern life to explore notions of pattern, scale, and repetition inspired by natural phenomena such as electromagnetism and emergent growth patterns.

Audrey Hasen Russell rescues a classicist fondness for materials and applies it to found objects and construction materials, drawing inspiration from the physical properties of the media she sculpts and assembles. Letha Wilson's art represents a new take on landscape photography, bringing it into three dimensions to allow sculptural and architectural vocabulary to attempt -- and fail -- to make up the shortfall between the photograph and the natural world that photography always, at some level, fails to encapsulatE. Wilson's works point out this failure, but stops just short of declaring the endeavor to capture the inspiration of the natural world fruitless in itself.

Godward received his M.F.A. in Sculpture from the State University of New York at Albany and is the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award from the International Sculpture Center in Hamilton, NJ. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.