Hi, I'm Leslie Bodzy and I'm an artist. I work in both New York City and in Houston, Texas, and I'm really happy to be showing my show Absence and Presence at the Linda Matney Gallery in Williamsburg, Virginia. I'm currently completing my MFA in studio art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where I'll graduate this summer and I'm actually coming to art as a second career. I was previously a business gal, but I'd always loved art and I'd always made things since I was a child. I was influenced by my mother to appreciate art color and design. Growing up, my mom was always rearranging the furniture, the fabrics, everything in our house and trying out new works of art. I started off in art as a painter of realistic still lives and I was using both watercolor and oil paints, and eventually, I got tired of realism and I moved into abstraction using acrylic paint on canvas, and I wanted to use my knowledge of color theory to create mysterious abstract worlds. Works like What Lions Dream About and What Lies Beneath are part of this series of large canvases showing mysterious worlds.
What Lies Beneath, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 72 in, 152.4 × 182.9 cm
What Lions Dream About, 2018, Acrylic and flashe on canvas, 60 × 72 in, 152.4 × 182.9 cm
In What Lies Beneath. I first began to experiment with throwing and pouring paint right onto the canvas. I wanted to dispense with brushes and I wanted to try something very spontaneous and experimental. I had always admired the work of Pat Steir who throws paint onto canvas, and I wanted to try it and I ended up really liking it and eventually, I became fascinated with the acrylic paint itself and the mediums. Acrylic paint is basically a plastic, so there are many ways to mix it and many different levels of viscosity and I really started to really like that tactile paint. So, um, I started to look at the works of Lynda Benglis in the 1970s, where she was actually pouring newly minted acrylic paint onto the floor and making sculptural shapes. She was not using canvas, just pouring it right on the floor. So I began to try that as well and I moved away from canvas and I started using the paint as an actual sculptural object within itself, just the piece of poured paint. So I created a series of molds, very small molds, different colors and I mounted them onto plexiglass. and I created a series of wall sculptures using this poured paint and these are the works that are called Yellow on the Upswing, Yellow Unwrapped and Gold Encased. They're all part of this series and these works are actually meant to be fun and playful. They can be displayed in many different ways: they can be mounted on the wall or they can hang from the ceiling and kind of twirl around, very colorful, or they can be mounted onto stands, which have a series of illuminations. You can illuminate the plexiglass on a tabletop or on a stand.
Yellow Unwrapped, 2020, Acrylic and plexiglass, 12 3/4 × 12 3/4 × 1/4 in, 32.4 × 32.4 × 0.6 cm
Gold Encased, 2020, Acrylic and plexiglass, 12 3/4 × 12 3/4 × 1/4 in, 32.4 × 32.4 × 0.6 cm
Next I began to experiment with this pure paint is more of a sculptural material and I started to use it to cover and fold and disguise objects and I tried to create mystery by covering and folding this paint over these objects. And I was referencing the formless and the surreal because the objects are meant to be evocative, but impossible to identify. And so these are the veiled works, The veiled and draped works. For example, Veil of Memory II and Hanging Drapes II show, it's actually a wrap of paint skin around a hidden object, the nature of which I'm not going to tell you because every viewer has their own interpretation of what's under the veil of paint. So I think, I think that this really is about absence and presence because the paint is present, but there's an absence of meaning. So there's no specific meaning the meaning emanates from the viewer's individual interpretation of the object below. These hanging drapes are mysterious and they take on a life of their own. Some can be interpreted with sexual innuendo, for example, What Cowbowys Don’t Have .
Hanging Drape 3, 2020, Acrylic pigments, medium and wire, 11 × 6 × 4 in, 27.9 × 15.2 × 10.2 cm
Veil Of Memory 2, 2020, Wall drape, acrylic pigments and medium, 11 × 5 × 3 in, 27.9 × 12.7 × 7.6 cm
Standing Drape , 2020, acrylic pigments and medium, Inquire
Using these malleable pieces of paint. I'm exploring the themes of absence and presence on a much larger scale. Jackie's fragility makes reference to the memory of Jackie O and it is made of one gigantic piece of paint. It's probably 12 feet by 12 feet, and it's been pushed and pulled into finally settling into its own sculptural shape that it was mounted on plexiglass. And it's meant to be viewed from all sides, both sides it's meant to be viewed as a hanging sculpture and both sides are very interesting. The plexiglass glass side has very interesting formations, organic shapes that are made of glue but it can also be mounted on the wall as a wall sculptural if one prefers.
Jackie's Fragility, 2020, Acrylic and medium, 71 × 55 in, 180.3 × 139.7 cm
So I would say that Jackie's fragility is actually a milestone work, as it is allowed me to think of using these pieces of paint on a much larger scale, which I'm currently doing and I'm currently working with a brilliant and visionary Lee Matney to bring the Absence and Presence show to the gallery in 2021. It will feature the works you can now see in the gallery and on artsy as well as several other works, which I'm currently producing, which will be wrapped and veiled objects. I'm so looking forward to meeting all of you in person at the Linda Matney gallery soon. Thank you.