Lale Westvind “Conflict Unknown”
Booklyn Art Gallery
This event has ended.
Coinciding with the release of Now & Here #3: Trial One, the final book in a series of experimental comic based works, Conflict Unknown combines original graphite drawings, paintings on wood panel, screenprints and a site-specific wall painting. Westvind’s drawings and paintings depict characters, symbols and events of an allegorical belief system spawned from the experimental comic series. Artworks act as artifacts, schematics, advertisements, religious relics and sacred objects of an imagined mythos from an alternate reality. The protagonists are confronted by physical and telepathic violence in murky jungles, abstract interiors, echoing black oceans, energetic mountain ranges and vast aggressive plains. Conflicted by cryptic forces, our heroines question their self-awareness, consciousness, and physicality.
While the juxtaposition of confidential sketches with finished works gives the viewer the illusion of omniscience, the works’ chaotic philosophy and apocryphal truths create a state of total unknown and questioning. Exploring the conflict between physicality and mind, the narrator, often shifting perspectives, dimensions and subsequent consciousnesses, chronicles the world both in first person and alternately as omnipresent guide. Westvind’s unparalleled poetic style is mirrored by her unusual work process, creating the drawings first and later allowing the text to evolve from that spontaneous visual narrative. The chaotic conflict and spiritual philosophy of the narrative are rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. The brash brushstrokes of Westvind’s paintings and layered graphite lines of her drawings capture overlapping moments in time and space reminiscent of Italian Futurism.
Conflict Unknown is Lale Westvind’s first solo-exhibition, the fifth and final in a series of one person shows dedicated to New York based artists exhibiting audacity and prolific output in the self-publishing community. Westvind attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and now lives in Harlem, New York. As an alternative comics and animation artist her work has been published and exhibited nationally, in 2012 she won the Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Media
Schedule
from November 22, 2014 to January 18, 2015
Opening Reception on 2014-11-22 from 19:00 to 22:00