A beauty in neglected things

OLGA LIVSHIN

Numbers and beauty, abstraction and esthetics, time and words – all coincide organically in Micah Lexier’s art. His latest exhibition, Working as a Drawing, opened on Sept. 6 at the Burnaby Art Gallery. It consists of 470 letter-sized paper sheets, culled from the artist’s extensive archives, identically framed and arranged side by side on several large wall panels. Scribbles and doodles, sketches, lists and photographs, each one enacts a moment in time, spanning 32 years of Lexier’s creative life.

“These were never intended to be displayed,” said Lexier in an interview with the Independent about the exhibition, which is accompanied by a book that features all its drawings. “They were my working papers, correspondence, printing errors. I don’t throw anything away. I have 35 file boxes, each filled with files for every project I ever worked on. There are tens of thousands of drawings in there. So, when I went through them, I thought that these are like my way marks, road signs for an artist. I wasn’t looking for beautiful, but they are beautiful in their own way.... The show is like a puzzle. When you break the code, you can see what it is all about. It throws light on my thought process behind the scene.”

The decision to display these drawings was spontaneous. “I chose the papers that spoke to me,” said Lexier. “And the book is an important part of the show. You can see each one of the drawings up close in the book, as you can’t on the gallery wall.”

In a way, the show resonates with Lexier’s collecting habits. He picks up things he finds on the streets – metal tokens, damaged keys, cardboard boxes with unusual markings – things other people have thrown away. “I cut images out of the boxes and frame them,” he said. A show involving these found items, called Things Exist, was held at the Birch Libralato gallery in Toronto in 2011.

About the work on display in Burnaby, Lexier said, “I like finding beauty in neglected things, discarded things. This latest show represents my own ‘found drawings.’ I’ve discovered unconventional beauty in them.”

Lexier discovers unconventional beauty in many objects, as well as ideas, that other people consider mundane. For example, currency. Among the artist’s most riveting past projects is I Am the Coin. He created it in 2010 for the Bank of Montreal. It was a wall of individually minted coins, each one with a letter imprinted on it. The entire installation told a story, written specifically for the project by Derek McCormack. The tale was narrated by one of the coins on the wall – a mischievous piece of money that reveled in puns, puzzles and cryptic remarks. If a viewer solved all the puzzles and followed all the clues, he could pinpoint the narrator among the 20,000 coins of the installation.

Although the installation was created for a yearlong display and is in storage now, Lexier found a way to prolong its visibility. He set up a website to follow that project: iamthecoin.com.

(Lexier’s creative fascination with numbers also spills into his private life; even his business cards are sequentially numbered. He gave card #648 to this reporter.)

Another project of his was A Portrait of David. “It was my first big break,” he recalled. “It was in 1994 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. I put an ad in a newspaper that we wanted to photograph a man called David, ages one to 75. We took photos of the first one who showed up of any age.”

The series of 75 photos of different Davids, mounted on a freestanding wall, acknowledged the general duality of manhood: each one of us is not only an individual, but a part of a larger whole.

Ten years later, Lexier returned to this concept with David Then & Now. He again photographed the Davids from the first project and installed the double images of each David, then and now, in bus shelters in Winnipeg. This campaign of public art took place in the summer of 2005, demonstrating both the universality of aging and the uniqueness of every man. Now, the images are part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

“That project reflected the passage of time and what it does to people,” the artist said, before pointing out that time is another one of his prevalent themes. “I have a series of drawings called A Minute of My Time. Each drawing took exactly one minute to make,” he explained. Some of these one-minute drawings can be viewed at the Burnaby gallery exhibit.

Lexier is often described as a conceptual artist, but he disagrees with the label. “Concept is only a starting point,” he said. “Then, I have to make esthetic decisions: how to make a story, how to show beauty in a different way. In this sense, every artist is conceptual: first the idea, then the execution. It’s like a combination of heart and brain.”

Working as a Drawing is at the Burnaby Art Gallery until Nov. 11.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

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