Wendy Letven, Earth Dance, 2017. Painted aluminum with walnut, 14 x 10 x 6 inches ©Wendy Letven, courtesy of Fou Gallery

 

Solo Exhibition

Lines Falling Together in Time

 

Lines Falling Together in Time

Artist: Wendy Letven

Feburary 29–May 10, 2020

(Extended to Jul. 18 due to COVID-19)

Curator: Lynn Hai

Wendy Letven’s art practice includes installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings and artist’s books. She explores a personal language of abstraction through different art mediums, with a focus on her interest in exploring and interpreting natural form, pattern, repetition and rhythm through her reductive creative process.

Letven’s installation and sculpture works blend forms and images that transform and redefine space and atmosphere in new ways. She develops her own vocabulary of evocative symbols to construct the syntax of a universal visual language. Her suspended installations and sculptures are dynamic ensembles of light, shadow, motion, and reflection as they are constantly activated by atmospheric factors such as air flow and shifting light. Their patterns, shapes and shadows interact with one another, resonating within the gallery space as an embodied material presence. Visitors to the gallery are invited to perceive between physical and illusionary distortions of the changing surroundings through space and time.

The central installation work in this exhibition highlights an abstract river suggesting the flow of form, rhythm, and time, implying the entrance to an abstract landscape. A statement from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu could precisely express the poetry of this abstract landscape, “Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

This exhibition also features Letven’s most recent paintings. The oil paintings explore flatness and space in a similar manner as her installations and sculptures. The application of layered, vibrating lines create different spatial relationships within their surfaces as they rise and fall away. The lines synchronize in areas, and then appear and disappear from one to another space. The logic and mechanism of the painted forms suggest abstract landscapes within states of synchronicity, resonance, and transformative flux.

Letven’s ink painting series started in 2010 around the time of the oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. Her worries about environmental changes, such as rising sea levels and super storms, have inspired her to imagine doomsday scenarios. Abstract expressions of subverted landscapes and rivers in the sky are depicted in her ink series. The series is less about exploration of forms, as they are investigations into a variety of physical rhythms. Their inquiry into the essence of flow stems from the painterly process of ink spills and liquid pours.

Fascinated with pattern and spatial relationships for years, Letven always grows her works by combining unrelated lines, shapes and symbols to pursue a deeper level of harmony from seemingly disparate visual entities. In the past years, her focus on creation has gradually transferred from interpreting the literal environment to exploring possibilities of abstraction. Her concerns regarding the destruction of nature have been relieved, as she develops her understanding of nature, human, time and space as a self-balanced and organic integration. Her recent works are always abstract visualizations of bigger images that imply the mechanism of space and time, and the fabric of the universe. She believes in the importance of abstract connections between phenomena, and seeks inspiration from other fields, including music, poetry, science and philosophy to build up an aesthetic synaesthesia shared among these different disciplines. She refers to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's theory that there exists an acausal connection between two or more psychic and physical phenomena or meaningful coincidence, because it expresses her strong belief in an omnipresent, deeper order of life rather than randomness. In essence, harboring a positive attitude towards the destruction, turbulence, and transformation of the world, Letven attempts to create joyful and exuberant artworks, in order to uplift her audience with peacefulness and optimism.

During Lines Falling Together in Time, Wendy Letven will collaborate with percussionist Gary Fredriksen, ceramist Ruth Borgenicht, and poet Sally Bliumis-Dunn to present three interdisciplinary art events, resonating with the works and interacting with visitors.

Text / Lynn Hai

 

Exhibition Catalogue

Artist - Wendy Letven

b.1962, Philadelphia, U.S.

Wendy Letven is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation and painting in the New York area. Raised in Philadelphia, she received a B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art and an M.F.A. from Hunter College. She currently teaches Art and Design at New York University and at Parsons School of Design. She has created installations for Urban Outfitter Headquarter (Philadelphia, 2020), PULSE Art Fair (Miami, 2019), Portal: Governors Island Art Fair (New York, 2019), Art on Paper Fair (New York, 2019), Market Art + Design (Bridgehampton, New York, 2019), Flatiron Prow Artspace (New York, 2018), and The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School (New York, 2018) among others. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recipient of a Workspace Grant from Dieu Donne Papermill in New York.