Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Blog & website

I hope to keep this blog updated but we'll see how I do.
Otherwise check out my website: lexyeich.weebly.com
It's. very pretty.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

5 year plan

Since I am about a week away from my BFA show and I am hating art at the moment, my five year plan consists more of taking a break. After I graduate SNC I hope to get a job as some kind of literary review editor. I already have some experience in that area and it was a lot of fun. During or after that I plan to move to one of the Carolinas. I have never been to the east coast and have always planned to move there sometime after I graduation. After I get sick of the east coast and miss my family, roughly five years later, I would move back to the west coast. Hopefully then I will be back in the art-making mode and I will move to San Francisco. There I will attend the University of San Francisco and get my MFA in Creative Writing and will do my other art on the side. 

This may or may not change the week after my BFA show when my brain begins functioning again. 

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Artist statements

I am a hunter and a gatherer, constantly accumulating images produced by the people and cultures around me. Segments of this collection of images then emerge in my paintings. My work shows images that are revealed as fragments in the midst of change, destruction, redefinition, and restoration. The sources they are drawn from are changing and evolving and the paintings are caught in that “still” moment of change. Today as the exchange of information increases on a daily basis, it becomes more difficult to trace the heredity of images. One is seldom afforded the time to begin to understand what one is viewing before the image has moved on and evolved. It is out of this fast paced exchange that I extract elements that resonate with a sense of vital meaning. I seek to use this wide language of visual marks and notations to describe that which humanity has in common, be it humor, mortality, or yearning to understand what is beyond.

My work is based in an eclectic aesthetic. My paintings extract elements from the high and low of visual culture. This culture and crush of images is in constant flux. My paintings hold no single allegiance, but are constantly shifting from one form of representation to another. The paintings function as sources of both inductive and deductive image making processes. In our day-to-day life, one is seldom afforded the time to comprehend what one is viewing under the barrage of images produced by humankind. I try to grasp a single moment, a glance, a small epiphany. The paintings are haptic documents of everything and nothing.

B: Amy Ellingson: http://amyellingson.com/
My work exaggerates the dichotomy between digital rendering processes and traditional
painting methodologies. All of my imagery, whether geometrically intact or abstracted and
chaotic, is comprised of a vocabulary of very simple forms that are digitally manipulated.
The paintings consist of many interrelated layers of repeating geometric forms–straight
lines and arcs, primarily–that I compose on the computer. I replicate these basic elements
into an increasingly complex field that I then render in discreet layers of oil and encaustic
paint. Using ephemeral, computer-generated images exclusively as my source material, I
create paintings that physically assert themselves through the materiality and permanence
of historical painting media. The translation from the virtual to the real is paramount.
 
My interests lie in the practices of formal repetition, variation and mutation within limited
serial networks. The works are created through a series of steps intended to conflate the
systemic and the gestural. Working within a self-reflexive system–borrowing, distorting,
manipulating, copying and pasting, re-contextualizing–I am able to create a personal lan-
guage that is hermetic, yet flexible and mutable. Digital tools enable me to develop a vo-
cabulary of forms that are used, grabbed, reused, and manipulated beyond recognition,
resulting in a signature vernacular of marks that are predetermined via digital processing.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

New poem

I'm taking the hospital and ocean poem out of my show and adding this one instead.


her thighs stick
to the seat
the summer heat
velcro when she
straightens up for you
complimentary smiles 
mask an acute urge
oxygened balloons
behind her teeth
begging for sky
for complimentary introductions


they almost made it
by the way

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

TLC's Hoarders submission

Kath wanted pictures of my room. I'm sorta messy & can't get rid of anything.



Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Show poems

Why I Can't Sing to You
they stare forgivingly
growing faint
that feeling you slipped about her
my disposition to nervous laughter
worn-out pages of exhausted excuses
free-falling face down 
the obsession of wordless songs 
and the overwhelming traces of our choices
drowning each lobe
parallel figures white flags 
and she wishes there were lyrics to sing to




[no title]

your eyes can't help but close
they've left us in this room alone
your bed is stiff
don't struggle to move for me; I'll fit
each breath brings 
this overactive nausea
closer to my mouth
I convince myself I smell
your high school cologne
July heated pavements on our backs
a kiss in Zippo-lit garage corners
this time I wish your mom would walk in on us
your words blocked 
by a deafening rattling in your lungs
my words blocked
choking cowardice
so I run most fingertips
back & forth on your knee
hoping it will pinken
ignoring its resemblance to my bent elbow
wake up, wake up
I'm enveloped in lines of panic
trying to make up for the last 1,384 days
and I breath so deeply
I break through all fabricated familiarities
the smell of 
empty Kleenex boxes
monitored room-temperatures
bleach white pillows
enables instant paralysis
I silently plead
wake up, wake up
so I can continue to not say a word to you




Taking Pictures at the Ocean

with each step we take
two to your one
grinding salt and sand
I wonder if you're thinking
about the space between your toes
I try to fill the empty space 
between my first two toes 
clenching them tight 
forcing closure to this humanly void
the first overlapping 
strangling the second
because the phantoms between
remind me too much 
of the lack of us






Wrong Turn
slick fingers 
retreat through yours
to race to her mouth
to tear at the anxiously red bits
of her bottom lip
your questioning fingers are rough
strangling hers again
if those knuckles were necks
they’d go limp
you’re trying to manufacture
a sense of security
she feels your heartbeat against my pinned wrist
You’re feeling my pulse, not my heartbeat. 
her pulse buried itself
behind both eardrums
banging on it
begging to it
spelling out arbitrary words
and she’d choke on her own breath
if it wasn’t holding those words back
Are you sure we’re here? 


Appointments
“She”
the name casually assigned
by your shrink
twice a week
this damaging orange bottle
chemical assurance 
why you've been placed
in this morbidly tidy space
for the last 42 minutes
two undiagnosed 
broken right hands
two unhinged
broken bedroom doors
two less-than mutual
mutual separations 
one bottom-heavy list of
things thrown against a wall
defense mechanisms 
against retaliation
her tears, your targets
and any chance of a clinically
healthy approach at intimacy
for either of you
suffocating under the debris
“She” 
doubles-up on
her daily face
but she doesn't have to come here




Shoot-out

she cries just to calm you down

displacing worry about your grip
that chair clearly aimed for
wreckage or her dropping jaw
she begins to shake
the buckles on her boots echoing her movements
she's wearing weathered cowboy boots
the spurs fall silent
she doesn't shoot
but you fall to the ground
pray you never get your hands on a gun again



[no title]

it lines
her teeth
her mouth
her tongue
tipping the 
crest 
of her 
top lip
when she 
tells you
her name

Wednesday, October 12, 2011