#ellen letcher

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Ellen Letcher

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STUDIO VISIT: ELLEN LETCHER

  New York (or rather Ridgewood/Bushwick based) artist Ellen Letcher recently opened her solo exhibition at Pocket Utopia – “Photo Still” (taken from the title of a poem by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill’s The Fox Bride).  RIOT OF PERFUME talked to Letcher on collages, Bushwick art and influences:

RIOT OF PERFUME: What is your background? When did you start making art? Ellen Letcher: I was born in Ohio but grew up in Baltimore, where we moved when I was five. I studied in Florida and briefly moved to New York right out of college when my father died suddenly of a heart attack about a month into my being in the city. My mother asked me to move home to sort out his print shop.

I had grown up working in his print shop; I started in the fourth grade cleaning the bathrooms and then eventually became the head graphic designer. Working in the printing business provided access to materials and supplies that I could use in my work. My favorite tool was the photocopier, which I used to create images and multiples to use in my collages.

Returning back to the shop where I grew up and my father had dropped dead on the floor was pretty rough, but it led me to spend many hours alone there, playing around with those photocopied images, pasting them on boards, working with them on all sorts of surfaces. I used anything I could get my hands on: cardboard from large ad film packages, mirrors, panels. I’m currently working on panels and a large four by 15 feet drop cloth.

We ended up closing the business. I got to keep one of the copiers and I moved it into to the basement of my parents’ home and this is where I would set up my studio for the next three years. This is also where I would start my first real collage series using paint as adhesive. Towards the end of these three years I got a call from an old friend from school who asked me to do the still photography for his first film. We spent the next three months shooting around the city. During this time I was able to land a job at Elle and George magazines, which meant I could finally come back to NYC.

  RIOT OF PERFUME: did Famous Accountants come about? We saw pictures of the skulls at Wyckoff Avenue in Bushwick—was that your first collaboration?

Letcher: One of the first galleries here in Bushwick, Austin Thomas’s Pocket Utopia, was coming to an end after a two-year run. It was created as a social project—gallery as a sketchbook. At its end is when my friend Kevin Regan approached me and suggested we keep the torch going and open Famous Accountants in the same vein: gallery as a sketch book. Kevin was one of my first friends when I moved to NY so we our work had already had a long dialogue. The interplay at Famous Accountants and the pasties, i.e. skulls, was more formal collaboration, or at least as formal as we can be.

There was also a strange serendipity in finding the space since the previous owners had built it with the hopes that it would one day be a gallery. The space belonged to Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, but Lady Jaye died before their dream could be realized. I had originally taken on the space as my studio but it would become Famous Accountants with my studio tucked to the side. They both left an intense energy in the space and when I first moved in when it was just my basement studio, the air was electric. I was almost a little afraid of the energy it was so intense. But my neighbor Jessica, who is a close friend of Genesis’s, assured me there would be a positive, good energy, and it was. Kevin and I would later joke that Lady Jaye was our dominatrix and we her slaves and that she was telling us what to do from another dimension (which still doesn’t seem so far fetched…). I came to find out later from Genesis that Lady Jaye died in the bathroom of their apartment, which is where my girlfriend and I ended up moving. Incidentally it’s my girlfriend’s favorite room in the apartment. Again, we assumed it must be Jaye’s always-looming pool of energy. There is still a large psychic energy that holds the space.

RIOT OF PERFUME: How involved are you with curating versus producing art? How different it is to you?

Letcher: Until Famous Accountants, I was strictly producing art for the most part. Someone has once suggested that my collages (if you in fact call them collages) are something of a curation of the page, I also tend to approach all things as “art projects.” For me, curating at Famous Accountants is an art process in and of its own. We also had a lot of guest curators, which I think keeps the whole experience fresh. It opened up a platform for lots of different people to participate and bring their unique energy and voice into the mix.

RIOT OF PERFUME: Can you tell us about your collage series? Particularly your use of paint as a form of adhesive, non-art materials, and the mixing of religious and fashion imagery.

Letcher: I started to work on them over a decade ago. I’ll start a series, leave it alone, then switch to photography or to printmaking, then back to my collage series to keep things fresh. I started making collage in college but I don’t think the idea of using paint as an adhesive really came together until later when I had my studio in the basement in Baltimore, which is where I spent a great deal of my time when I was staying with my mother for those three years. I was working a handful of part time jobs so I had a lot of time each day to spend in the studio. Once I discovered using paint as adhesive, I embarked upon an ongoing obsession to see how many directions I could/can take it, or take the viewer somewhere new.

[To address the imagery question], I have always been obsessed with religious iconography. I was raised Catholic and the only way I could deal with sitting still through church was by looking at all the sculptures of the stations of the cross that hung around the church and making up stories about them in my head. I also had a born-again Christian grandmother and she would take me to her church, Assembly of God, where people would speak in tongues. I was in grade school so this really freaked me out—I mean they were really into it, it was full possession or something. This intense spirituality would stay with me even if it did not played out in the way of being a born-again Christian or even Catholic for that matter. I was also born on my grandmother’s birthday so I was the favorite and she really wanted us to share going to church together, watching all these old biblical movies—the parting of the red sea—all of it. Her passion for this scared me and intrigued me at the same time: this belief she had for something that could not be shattered by anyone.

As for fashion imagery: After getting the job at Elle and George, I ended up staying at the company for the next 13 years working basically on all of their publications. Fashion, naturally, crept into all of my work. Dealing with all the layouts and making the physical dummy of the books definitely impacted the way I looked at things and how I approached my work.

On a side note, I believe fashion can be religious in it own right. The ceremony of getting dressed, what you’re projecting or withholding, these things are all at play.

  RIOT OF PERFUME: In some ways your work seems to be influenced by Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” especially when he talks about  “the generosity of finding surprises” in the work of art. Was he an influence?

Letcher: I was not thinking about Rauschenberg while working but, looking back and thinking of the first time I saw his “Bed” piece, I think it did have an impact on me. I was probably in high school the first time I saw it and something there struck a cord with me. The materials he used, knowing that was a blanket from his bed—I wanted to take it home and just stare at it. One of my favorite parts of making art is this element of surprise when something emerges out of the work, the generosity of finding surprises. Oh, and of course all his “Combines”. I like to make combined humans. I just finished a piece with twins boys that yielded an eagle when I was done, which was a total and welcome surprise.

RIOT OF PERFUME: Which other artists have influenced your work?

Letcher: This is a hard one…so many. The Surrealists, Raymond Pettibon, Gertrude Stein, Alexander McQueen, Frida Kahlo, Ben Godward, Austin Thomas, Harry Houdini, William S. Burroughs, Lee Krasner, Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Paul Gaultier, Kurt Cobain, Valie Export, J.G. Ballard. Poets—especially Jennifer Fumiko Cahill and Jason Marak. And also, all the innocents, such as Henry Darger

RIOT OF PERFUME: What projects are you working on now?

Letcher: I’m working on my first solo show called Photo Still that opens this June at the new Pocket Utopia that just reopened on the Lower East Side run by Austin Thomas and Armin Kunz. Austin wants to deepen the conversation that was started at Pocket Utopia in Bushwick. Pocket Utopia, along with Jason Andrew’s Norte Maar, really brought together the whole Bushwick community.

RIOT OF PERFUME: What have you seen recently in music/film/arts/performance that has impressed you? Anything in the neighborhood of Ridgewood/Bushwick?

Letcher: I just saw Calypso, a literary performance at the Bushwick Starr by Paul Rome and Roarke Menzies, and it was amazing. It was read in the style of straight-up old-time storytelling but the story mixed together very different time periods, with two readers taking turns at the same story told two different ways. It held my attention for hours which is a great feat. Also, there is a show of Kristin Jensen’s work currently at Norte Maar.  English Kills Gallery is also one of my Bushwick neighborhood favorites. Andrew Ohanesian and Tescia Seufferlein’s Blind Spot is the first show I saw there and it is maybe the best show I have seen in New York. They recreated an entire house within the gallery, which you could enter and walk around; it was the strangest, most visceral experience I have ever had in reaction to a show. When you do you find the back half of the house, it has exploded. You couldn’t tell where the show began and where it ended. It transformed the entire gallery, it was unrecognizable…just the way I like it.

front page: “Sidewalk”, top:”Biker” by Ellen Letcher. Studio photographs by Katarína Hybenová.

“Photo Still” a solo exhibition by Ellen Letcher is at Pocket Utopia from June 9th to July 15th, 2012.

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City of Women

Installation view, “To Be a Lady,” Vanessa German,”Toaster”(2011). Mixed media, 31 ½ x 14 x 12 inches. (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)

There is something ineffably comforting about To Be a Lady, the exhibition curated by Jason Andrew and subtitled Forty-Five Women in the Arts. The second time I visited the show, on a misty, autumnal afternoon, the light-filled bays at 1285 Avenue of the Americas seemed to lead back to a once intimate, now forgotten place.

I specify my second visit because my first was preoccupied with the show’s startling scale, ambition and quality: a museum-caliber exhibition unenclosed by museum walls.

In his review of To Be a Lady in Monday’s Hyperallergic, Howard Hurst compares its significant presence of artists associated with the New York School to the Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster Abstract Expressionist New York (October 3, 2010-April 25, 2011) and its paltry smattering of women.

Nancy Grossman, “Potawatami” (1967). Leather collage using horse harnesses and chain, 63 x 37-3/4 x 13 inches. (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York.)

The current exhibition, as Hurst suggests, may be viewed as a corrective to that show, and Andrew, in his catalogue essay, makes a similar allusion. But the differences go well beyond proportional representation.

One of the points of discussion about Abstract Expressionist New York as well as MoMA’s recent de Kooning: a Retrospective (September 18, 2011-January 9, 2012) was how difficult it is to hang a Pollock or a DeKooning in the same room with other artists.

I would venture that the same could be said, to a greater or lesser extent, of just about any major male figure from that era — Still or Rothko or Motherwell or Kline, who never seem to tire of jostling each other. Their machismo is integral to their aesthetic power as well as to their postwar historical context.

The parade of objects in To Be a Lady (and there is a definite sense of movement to the exhibition, with each bay acting as a theatrical reveal) never evinces that kind of territoriality or self-protection.

While generational differences in style and content are readily apparent, the work — primarily painting and sculpture but also photography, collage, video and text — feels seamlessly integrated in a way that owes as much to the art’s ethos as it does to Andrew’s expert and imaginative curatorial eye.

This is art that invites you in rather than brushes you aside. Even something as bilious as Jay DeFeo’s acrylic-on-Masonite “Lotus Eater No. 2” (1974) or as confrontational as Nancy Grossman’s leather-and-chain bas-relief “Potawatami” (1967) feels open and inclusive of its neighbors – Grossman’s yin-yang relationship with the yarn sculpture beside it, “Omega Female” by Ellie Murphy, being a case in point: the latter imparts a degree of levity to the former, while Grossman’s weather-beaten straps and orifices lend visceral intensity to Murphy’s soft trails of fabric.

Tamara Gonzales, “Plastic Fantastic” (2011). Spray paint on canvas, 65 x 100 inches (diptych). Courtesy of the artist. (Photo by Jason Mandella)

One of the ironies of To Be a Lady (implicit in its title, which Andrew asserts is meant as a provocation) is that the pieces derived from traditional notions of domesticity — “women’s work” in the not-gender-neutral term — are often the most aggressive: the lace-based paintings of Tamara Gonzales and Judy Pfaff; the ten-foot-high stitched and sewn collage by Brece Honeycutt; Kristen Jensen’s crushed porcelain plates; the monumental black linen weaving by Lenore Tawney, who died in 2007 at the age of 100; and the nightmarish doll assemblages from Vanessa German and May Wilson, who has been called, according to the wall label, the “Grandma Moses of the Underground.”

Aggressiveness is on full display in conventional media as well, with tough and jagged paintings by Pat Passlof, Elizabeth Condon, Grace Hartigan, Mira Schor, Brooke Moyse and, with a marked acidity, Elizabeth Murray.

Alma Thomas, “Red Scarlet Sage” (1976). Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches. (Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.)

That artworks this spiky can make room for Murphy’s yarn or a wacky still-life-with-duck painting by Edith Schloss — not to mention the deadpan readymades of Jessica Stockholder and Nancy Bowen or the sensual abstractions by Alma Thomas, Janice Biala, Lindsay Walt and Judith Dolnick — is remarkable enough, but it also speaks to the communal spirit infusing the exhibition.

In an interview I conducted with Andrew for Hyperallergic Weekend back in February, he described the thriving artists’ community in Bushwick in terms of “collective individuality,” and To Be a Lady feels like an extension of that concept, drawing contemporary practitioners and their foremothers into its mutual embrace.

The accessibility of the venue — the street-level lobby of the UBS Building (free and open to the public) around the corner from the 25-bucks-a-pop Museum of Modern Art — plays into the nonexclusive (one might even say anti-elitist) gestalt of the exhibition. The floor-to-ceiling windows flanking the bays bring the city into the art, with the art reflecting back into the city.

The comfort I felt on my second visit — an odd feeling of coming home — came from a fresh sense that the current state of art-making has fully left behind the style wars of decades past to enter a wide-open field upon which all are welcome to make a mark.

Pat Passlof, “Hawthorne” (1999). Oil on linen, 87 x 75 inches. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery and The Resnick/Passlof Foundation, New York)

The historical continuum populated by the women in this show, which takes note of the commonalities between artists like German, who was born in 1976, and Wilson, who died in 1986, without claiming to much for them, subtly underscores the transmigration of experiences and ideas over time.

Such a narrative, if you want to call it that, has never granted much weight to the old-school idea of aesthetic progress; rather, it turns on circles within circles around a dishabille nexus of art and life.

The women I know who are participants in the exhibition (along with Tamara Gonzales, mentioned above, there’s Austin Thomas, Julia Gleich, Mary Judge, Ellen Letcher and Nathlie Provosty) bear this out. Each pursues her art-making through a hands-on, empirical and experimental approach that continually intersects the ideational and the experiential, acknowledging the chaos of living while uncovering the stillness at its core.

In his catalogue essay, Andrew quotes the art historian Eleanor Munro’s observation that a female artist “would not have to break with her past to become herself as, it seems, the creative male is impelled to overthrow his father by symbolically rejecting his art.”

Judith Dolnick, “Untitled”(2012). Acrylic on canvas, 52 x 108 inches. (Courtesy of the artist)

The seven decades of art encompassed by this exhibition prove what a waste of psychic energy that is. By dispensing with the male model of conflict and domination, these women (along with those who pioneered performance and body art) have afforded themselves the freedom to survey a vastly changing and complex world and respond with art forms that match its complexity and mutability.

Not breaking with the past implies a sense of serenity about the present as well as an acceptance of a future that will continue without us. It proposes a mode of living with no gambits, no endgame and no rules. And it places art, as a means of illuminating who we are, right in the center of it.

To Be a Lady is on view at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery (Midtown, Manhattan) through January 18.

via Substance Digital http://bit.ly/RoDkTO

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Opens Tonight, June 9, 6-8p: "Photo Still"  Ellen Letcher

Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC (bt Clinton & Jefferson St) F train to East Broadway Wresting images from glossy magazines and pasting them down with paint, Letcher creates a highly idiosyncratic collection of pictorial data. She replays this device of painting and pasting, maintaining a graphic energy while carefully editing, and anything might and does happen along the way. - July 15

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Ellen Letcher