LEE MAIDA:
LIT END

Joe Shef­tel Gallery is pleased to present Lit End, Lee Maida’s first solo exhi­bi­tion with the gallery. An open­ing recep­tion will be held on Sun­day, April 19, from 6-8pm. The exhi­bi­tion will be on view through May 24, 2015.

Lit End is com­prised of a series of paint­ings, both two and three dimen­sional, pro­duced by a vari­ety of processes and only spo­rad­i­cally employ­ing brush or paint. Each object is con­structed in an ambiva­lent rela­tion­ship with both grid and lump, as Maida repeat­edly con­structs the face.

The face is a crit­i­cal zone for Maida as the loca­tion con­not­ing sen­sual, spir­i­tual and cere­bral engage­ment and emo­tive expres­sion. In Notes on Thought and Vision, the imag­ist writer H.D. pro­poses her con­cept of an extra-cranial brain that is the cre­ative cen­ter syn­the­siz­ing mind and body. She imag­ined this as “a jel­ly­fish placed over and about the brain,” whose ten­ta­cles extend down­ward to con­nect to the body in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to the spinal chord and ner­vous sys­tem. This syn­thetic expres­sion is the sub­ject of Maida’s work in the sense that it is what is stud­ied and ren­dered rather than sim­ply per­formed.

Maida’s art his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions cen­ter around this time­less mind/body ideal. In a free-associative man­ner, she can­ni­bal­izes a ran­dom selec­tion of forms, sym­bols and strate­gies as a way of work­ing through power, libido and identity-formation. Obser­va­tion is key as the tis­sue between the ambigu­ous soup of sub­jec­tive cre­ation and the receipt of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion ren­der­ing lan­guage both an obsta­cle and a tool.

“They were con­stantly argu­ing about art and each of them, at first, had his own ideas and his own style. Jawlen­sky was far less intel­lec­tual than Kandin­sky or Klee and was often frankly puz­zled by their the­o­ries. My 1908 por­trait enti­tled ‘Zuhören’ (Lis­ten­ing, fh) actu­ally rep­re­sents Jawlen­sky, with an expres­sion of puz­zled aston­ish­ment on his chubby face, lis­ten­ing to Kandinsky’s new the­o­ries of art.” — Gabriele Mün­ter ¹

Lee Maida (b. 1983) received her BFA from Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts and her MFA from Bard Col­lege Mil­ton Avery Grad­u­ate School of Arts (2013) where she was the recip­i­ent of the Judith L. Cohen and Lawrence R. Klein Fel­low­ship for Sculp­ture. She has exhib­ited her work at Kate Werble, Derek Eller, Andrew Kreps, Andrew Edlin, Tax­ter & Spenge­man and Ed. Varie in New York and ACP, Parker Jones and Com­mon­wealth & Coun­cil Los Ange­les. Maida recently com­pleted res­i­den­cies at the Abrons Art in New York and the Mac­Dow­ell Colony in New Hamp­shire.

For press inquiries and images, please con­tact the gallery at mail@joesheftelgallery.com.

^{1. [“Roditi, Edouard. Dia­logues: Con­ver­sa­tions with Euro­pean Artists at Mid-Century (Lon­don, United King­dom: Lund Humphries, 1990), 117.]↩}