Join Parts & Labor’s first-ever artist in residence Michael Gac Levin for a family-friendly opening on Friday, February 23rd at 5 PM. The artist will exhibit ten small works, which were begun in his Brooklyn studio and completed during his residency.
Levin’s paintings aim at the mystery and the intensity of childhood. At the core of his work is a lighthearted, diaristic drawing practice guided by repetition and humor. Riding a wobbly line down into memory, he finds images that speak to our predicaments in the present and the uncertainty of the future. As they feed into paintings, the drawings take on color, bringing associations to nostalgia, the nocturnal, and the fantastical. His reflective, dreamlike compositions offer views of a world in which everything is animate and purposeful. A world where anything might suddenly rise to speak, stalk or play. A sense of archaic monumentality pervades the images, but feels as soft and yielding as a pillow fort or a loaf of bread. As a father of two young children, he understands his work as a way to reimagine traditions of masculinity, authority, and patrimony. Planted among the grateful ruins of a haunting past, his paintings are dreams of what we will leave behind ourselves.
Artist Statement
The works made here share a common goal: to develop a painting practice capable of catching and imprinting the many sensations, jogs of mind, and small calamities one typically experiences in a day. This way of working has, for a few years now, been at the foundation of all my studio work. But the diaristic quality I’m talking about resides most comfortably in my sketchbook. Painting has always been a bit too slow, a bit too ponderous to capture the churn of a daily rhythm and the grand creative potential it can hold. I need a flypaper painting.
Small children show the adult world how to be direct and unmediated, honest to a fault. Lacking our ability to mediate their experience with self-control, they themselves become mediums for experience. Their play captures and displays everything that has impressed them, ritualizes everything that has challenged or stifled them. No child ever imagined a game that did not retell their own life; that did not mythologize the profound mystery beneath it. Every portrait is a self-portrait. But when your existence so nearly borders the cosmic, the work of art comes as easily and unconsciously as an outbreath. We approach this kind of creativity in dreaming. The Surrealists understood this.
I make this bet as a guiding principle for my creative life, my play life, as it can only be for my dream life. Making should and shall be metabolizing: I’ll be a wondering instrument for my experience to play. No sight, sound or accident can be insignificant, because each is an apple awaiting its set of teeth. The mouth is memory. The work is to grind meaning from today.
+ See complete works list and email meaghan@partsandlaborsa.org for sales.
