Ellen K. Levy

HOUSING NATURE

January 8 - February 7, 1998
Artist's reception: Thursday, January 8, 6-8 p.m.

Ellen K. Levy won a 1995-1996 AICA award (International Association of Art Critics) in the category of Best Show By An Emerging Artist for her first solo exhibition, Converging Lineages, with Associated American Artists.

In her second solo exhibition here, Ellen Levy's oil on wood paintings continue to portray dynamic architectural environments, and now she has allowed animal and plant life to inhabit the spaces. Creating interiors which become a kind of museum/laboratory, she excavates and displays a collection of curiosities. For example, in Hall of Wonders (Agassiz Upended), the Naturalist's statue which was turned upside down in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, mingles with the shadowed form of a long-horned African quadruped. Other references to human presence are evoked in such cultural inventions as tools, classification tables, and an icon of Marilyn Monroe. Hall of Wonders (Agassiz Upended) hosts these and numerous other images including a dangling Baselitz head and a large skeletal specimen.

"Ellen Levy's new paintings are send-ups of various Natural History displays with an arrangement of things that is more enigmatic than functional. She has long created images that witness a genuine fascination with how scientific logic can augment the mystery and beauty of art."

"Levy's passionate and informed attitude toward science is dialectical. She stresses the irrelevance of classic dichotomy between art and science as the subjective versus the objective, pointing our their striking similarities. However, in an increasingly technological art world, she treats painting as a medium for expressing the mysterious, sensual, and fluid. With a tongue-in cheek attitude toward subject matter in her current art she engages in a freeplay of visual signifiers. Viewing her works, one confronts, in fact, a painterly sensibility, passion, or perhaps even a creative "madness" that brings to mind the expressions of Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Hoffman."

Excerpts from Marek Bartelik's text in the exhibition catalogue.
Gallery contact: Carol McCranie

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