THE FAIR UNKNOWN
Reception: Saturday, October 4, 1 – 5 p.m.
September 2 – October 23, 2014
Using thick layers of resin and fragmented fashion magazines, Josie Lewis creates intricate dimensional collages that reference cellular biology, starscapes, kaleidoscopes, and explosions.
Artist Bio
Josie Lewis was raised in northern Minnesota on the shores of Lake Superior in an octagon shaped house. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Twin Cities area and nationally. She has an MFA from the University of MN and currently lives in North Minneapolis with her husband and daughter.
Artist Statement
I make semi-sculptural slabs of epoxy resin and found paper collage. I use cut fashion magazine images that are intricately layered between multiple pours of resin. My attraction to these magazines consists of a complex push-pull of distaste mixed with formal relish. Like an archivist, I dig, sift and edit. The magazine is milled into a kind of analog pixilation wrought by my scissors and utility blade. I seek to draw attention to the source material while simultaneously damaging it almost to the point of elimination. The glossy magazine becomes a glossy and heavy slab; shredded, exploded, inside out and backwards. I am administering a its rebirth to a more perfect object: solid, definite, personal, precise and terribly permanent. The resin slabs are seductively handmade and aggressively beautiful.
Christensen Center Art Gallery – map
Hours: M – F, 8 a.m. – 8 p.m.; Sat. & Sun. 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
THE FAIR UNKNOWN – Studio Tour
“How did you make that?”
Josie Lewis hears this a lot. At first glance, her work is a large, glossy mosaic of colors and abstract shapes. Coming closer, it reveals itself to be a series of layers – clipped images that combine to create something that might be found under a microscope (intricate and lifelike) or perhaps a telescope (celestial and expanding). And suddenly we are lost in wonder.
This ponderous moment, suspended in thought like pieces of paper in resin, is the result of both a meticulous process and an intuitive hunt and response. On her studio’s table, stacks of magazines stand in the midst of small pieces of “found treasures” through which she digs, looking for the right color, image, or pattern—anything that inspires her.
She starts, typically, by looking in Vogue Magazine, not because of the content but the quality of the pages. The paper from these and National Geographic holds up the best throughout the creation of her work. The fair unknown originates in the former, 12 copies of the same issue from 2013. Within a wooden and aluminum mold, she pours black ink, a layer of resin, and waits 24 hours. Then a layer of magazine forms, a layer of resin, and wait… repeating this layer by layer until a patchwork form emerges over the course of 8 – 15 layers. Sometimes an idea is clear from the beginning, while other times the piece works itself out as she goes.
With a drawer full of scissors and another of Elmer’s glue sticks, Lewis thinks of this process as “reordering something that already exists,” cataloging Vogue through another perspective. Through the destructive act of cutting, the magazine is demolished and revived, transforming it into something redeeming and life-giving.
To those watching as she works, the process is clearly meditative. Small bits from an ocean of glossy pages carefully congregate, sit, and move around the composition, coming together to create a greater whole.
Lewis started out painting at the University of Minnesota. Gifted with a knack for technical skill but frustrated by a lack of voice in her work, she began cutting her work apart. Discovering an interest in the surface of the paint, she created collages in secret, experimenting with the resin she saw her sculpture friend using. The urge to create work that had been whispering to her now had a voice. She found the new medium, materials, and a symbiotic relationship in which the materials informed the work and vice versa.
Now, Lewis would be in the studio all the time if she could, but life intercedes. Usually found working on her current series in sporadic bursts throughout the day and after her little one goes to bed, she holds to the advice she gives artists of any stripe or level of expertise: The more you make work, the better you get and the easier it is to find what you like. Time is essential. Spend time making work.
Next, Lewis looks forward to casting objects in resin and also returning to paint, exploring its surface and the gradation of color. In the meantime, she loves the reactions people have to her work, especially kids. “It’s like a firework mixed with a flower mixed with a machine.” The material gives people an entry point to engage in the work. We are familiar with and thrown off by the material. The depth, the trick, the illusion engages people as they come closer. And from the pages of what we feel we know, we respond in common, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
www.josielewis.com
THE FAIR UNKNOWN – images
