Les LeVeque & Pearl Blauvelt
January 20 - February 24, 2013
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
Les LeVeque's Frequency Redundancy, a 43-second, 16 mm loop, is based on an old, degraded, educational copy of The Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory In Lyon that he discovered in the film library of a liberal arts college. Copied, reconstructed, layered 100 times and reversed by LeVeque, the found footage becomes a hallucinatory dream about the modern factories of education, cinema and industry.
In 1895 the Lumiere brothers set up their camera outside the gates of their factory. Inside the gates the brothers assembled approximately 100 of their employees. Their short film begins when the gates swing open and the "workers" disperse into the street.
The exhibition will include a number of canvases imprinted with layered images from the film. Each of the canvases has been repeatedly run through a printer, some as many as 30 times, creating dark and mysterious compositions.
This is Les LeVeque's third one-person show at Kerry Schuss gallery. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and also at Sundance Film Festival.
Born in 1893, two years before the Lumiere brothers made their first movie, Pearl Blauvelt lived reclusively in a small house in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where she produced an abundance of small pencil drawings of domestic objects, many of which she copied from mail order catalogues on lined notebook pages. The six drawings in this exhibition are from one series titled, Clothing Department.
In 1950, Blauvelt left her home. The house remained empty until 2000, when two artists purchased it and discovered a box filled with more than 400 of Blauvelt's drawings. Though she had no training, her gridded compositions and repetitive motifs evince an instinctively playful sense of design while her tender yet emphatic draftsmanship conveys a poetic and often humorous feeling for ordinary things like nylon stockings and patterned blankets that she may have yearned to own but had not the wherewithal to possess in real life.
This is Pearl Blauvelt's fourth show at Kerry Schuss gallery. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The John Michael Kohler Art Center and The Weatherspoon Art Museum,