The Universe is on the Inside

the seemingly never-ending pandemic, the economy, our toxic social and political divisions, our racial legacies and this momentous presidential election. Sometimes it feels like all I can muster, just gazing out the window. And yet it feels like precisely the right thing to do, to take a moment to reflect, looking inward as I gaze outside, trying to make sense of myself in the great pendulum swings of civilization, of the true nature of human nature, and of our place in the vast, vast universe where the earth’s tiny rotation around the sun measures the endless passing of time and the stars remind us of where we came from. 

While the pandemic and all the rest have led to a lot of soul searching, the objects of daily life that sustain me in the studio - my work table, my ladder, the old beat up loft windows, my medicine cabinet and old armoire, travel crates, and the raw materials of art making - have become a kind of ballast, offering themselves up as subjects for my work. And as if to bear witness to this moment in time, a couple of antique mirrors are reflecting back to me the life I am grateful to have chosen. 

As in my last show, these paintings continue to hover between abstraction and representation, where the shape of each painting takes on the contours of the objects they represent. While the viewer’s willingness to participate in the suspension of disbelief is duly challenged by the undeniability of the material, it’s the seduction of verisimilitude that keeps disbelief suspended. This hovering between the two is the fascinating engine behind perception, which takes place not only in the clinical brain, but fully occupies the mind as a realm of the senses. 

Leslie Wayne