Jill Levine “Cats Talk”

Hionas Gallery LES

poster for Jill Levine “Cats Talk”

This event has ended.

Hionas Gallery presents Cats Talk, a solo exhibition of new and recent mixed-media sculpture and drawings from artist Jill Levine. A full color catalogue will accompany the exhibition and include an essay by Tavia Fortt.

Levine’s wall mounted sculptures are true anomalies, each one a quasi-symmetrical lifelike figure born neither of nature nor folklore, but rather the artist’s own travels, imagination and reinterpretation of iconography, with an effect that is plastic, painterly and playful. In recent years Levine has traveled frequently to Mexico, making it something of a second home. For this series she has adopted renderings of various mythological ancients—such as Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of the Underworld, as well as Mayan glyphs and the more recent La Calavera Catrina, the skeletal “lady of death” that has become the icon for Dia de Muertos—which she then projects onto her blank forms, serving as inspiration for the final composition of intricate, weighted and intersecting lines that seem to bear coded references in each curve and contour. Also informing the graphic, even textile-design quality found on a number of Levine’s pieces are antique cylinder seals, which were once used to stamp clay vessels in relief, as well as to decorate fabric, paper, and skin.

For her sculptures the artist begins with Styrofoam pieces of varying shape and size then assembles them into gaunt and voluptuous concoctions, not unlike those found in the animation of George Dunning or Terry Gilliam. The pseudo-abstract forms she arrives at over time are creaturely and totemic hybrids with little regard for physiology. The pieces are then covered in plaster-dipped gauze, modeling compound, and finally painted in oil. Each has a singular presence, as if removed from the totem, placed on the wall, and evolving on its own with distinct coloration and poise.

In Cats Talk Levine also presents a series of 5 x 7 in. pencil and gouache drawings, each one an angular codex depicting the very forms that inspire her sculpture. In a sense these pieces reveal the larger body of work’s genesis, and also show the artist’s exacting gift for line and pattern.

Media

Schedule

from April 17, 2014 to May 11, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-04-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Jill Levine

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use