Rising star Lesley Vance will visit campus Wednesday in celebration of the opening of her solo exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. The artist's still-life oil paintings push the conventions of the medium. She will discuss her approach with Mark Wethli, chair of the art department, next Wednesday.
"I first saw her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York during its 2010 biennial," said Diana Tuite, the show's curator and Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow. "I found out that while her work had been picked up by the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, she had not yet had a solo museum exhibition."
"I wanted to bring a painter to the museum, and being a young artist, I thought that she'd be someone students would want to see," Tuite added.
In conjunction with the show, the museum and the art department will sponsor a conversation next Wednesday between Vance and Wethli.
"Mark, very generously, agreed to facilitate a conversation with Lesley," said Tuite. "We felt that his perspective as a painter was invaluable, and that—with an informal conversation format— Mark could help students feel comfortable with approaching Lesley during her time here."
"I've done public interviews with other artists before, and it can be an interesting change from the typical artist's lecture," wrote Wethli in an email to the Orient. "Her work has been getting a lot of attention nationally and internationally, including a good number of artist's talks, so I think she welcomed the change of pace."
Vance works from photographs of her own still-life arrangements. In painting from photographs, Vance's works treat shadow and space ambiguously, which results in a rewarding sustained look.
"I admire her work for her mastery of paint and the mercurial depiction of forms and spaces almost interchangeably as solid and void, transparent and opaque," wrote Wethli. "What appears like a shadow one moment, for instance, can also work as an empty space the next."
In drawing from still lifes, Vance's work responds to the style and perpetuates it.
"My hope for the talk, in addition to helping people learn more about Lesley and her work, is to give the audience a sense of how artists talk with one another, which is often a blend of art history, subjective art history, art theory, shop talk, what materials we prefer, what's happening in the news, philosophical ideas, biographical information, and so forth," wrote Wethli.
A painter himself, Wethli provided insights into her vision and her engagement with her materials.
"What I find most engaging about her work...is the way that Lesley has pushed and expanded the parameters of still-life painting beyond depicted objects per se to the visceral, optical, and emotional sensations that are an essential part of this type of painting but which are not always explicit," wrote Wethli. "She's actually showing us the way that painters see—and especially the way that she sees—in a way that is representational and abstract at the same time, and also about subject matter and the painting medium at the same time."
Tuite added that Vance's work would appeal to a wide range of museumgoers.
"As a museum, in showing contemporary art, we look for artists who are just on the cusp of breaking through," she said. "Vance's work has a lot of accessibility and versatility."
"Lesley Vance in Conversation with Mark Wethli" will be held next Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Beam Classroom at the Visual Arts Center.
Vance's exhibition will be on view April 12 through July 1.