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February Issue
2011
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Leslie Wayne
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at
the College of Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, SC,
is presenting the exhibit, Leslie Wayne: Recent Work, on
view through Mar. 12, 2011.
The exhibition represents the past five years of Wayne's vibrant,
sculptural oil paintings. The works range in size from 14 feet
long to as intimate as 10 x 13 inches. Wayne states that her large
works are inspired by landscape and geology and are a secular
contemporary and abstract response to 19th century Romantic Landscape
painting.
"Rather than paint pictures of landscapes, Wayne chooses
to capture the corporeal essence of nature by offering an analogous
experience to being in the natural world. Alluding to compression,
subduction and the shifting of tectonic plates, she packs the
narrative passages into the interstices of each successive layer
of paint, testing the range of Richard Serra's famous 'Verb List'
by pulling, scraping, folding, cutting and collaging her material
like clay," states Mark Sloan, curator of this exhibition
and Director/Senior Curator at the Halsey Institute.
In addition to taking cues from landscape, Wayne draws inspiration
from fashion and fabric to fractals and chaos theory but rarely
in anticipation of a specific work. Wayne states, "I don't
set out to make a painting about a particular subject. I am a
Process painter in that respect in that I allow the phenomenology
of the material to lead the way. I may begin with a set of conditions,
like a shaped panel for example, but then I take my cues from
the working process. I think of it as a conversation between material
memory and morphogenesis the repetition of a process that
leads to an intended result and the will of the material to do
what it will do."
The smaller paintings in the exhibition are part of a series entitled
One Big Love. Wayne began these works while simultaneously
working on her larger paintings in an effort to challenge herself
with new parameters within a familiar and comfortable format.
The series however now includes over fifty-five paintings, each
embodying a unique world of highly manipulated, striated paint.
Wayne was born in 1953 in Germany, but grew up in Southern California
where she originally studied traditional oil painting and had
a strong connection to the Western landscapes tradition. Her undergraduate
studies began at the University of California, Santa Barbara in
Painting and she finished with a BFA in Sculpture from Parsons
School of Design. After her move to New York City in 1982, she
abandoned observational painting and developed her signature style
of intuitive painting, which is exemplified in this exhibition
at the Halsey Institute.
Leslie Wayne: Recent Work has been organized by the Halsey
Institute and will travel to multiple venues around the country
after making its debut in Charleston. To accompany the exhibition
and give insight into Wayne's process, the Halsey Institute has
commissioned a film by John Reynolds. The Halsey has also produced
a full-color catalogue with an essay by Ron Platt, Curator of
Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. The
catalogue will be for sale during the exhibition at the Halsey
Institute.
Wayne has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions
including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Peace
Tower/Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, NY (both 2006); Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; Museum of Fine
Arts, St. Petersburg, FL (both 2003); The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Miami, FL (2001); Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica,
CA (2000); and The Continuous Painting Wall, Birmingham
Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (1999). She was the recipient of
a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting
and a past grant recipient from both the Pollock-Krasner Foundation
and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is administered by the
School of the Arts at the College of Charleston and exists to
advocate, exhibit and interpret visual art, with an emphasis on
contemporary art.
For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery
listings, call the Institute at 843/953-4422 or visit (www.halsey.cofc.edu).
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