Elisa Lendvay accumulates detritus including pieces from the broken body of a yellow cab, aluminum baking pans discarded and weathered from the street, and other things like bamboo sticks, umbrella spines and green hanging folders usually found in corporate offices. Rather than reflect on specific critical or formal concerns however, Lendvay approaches her practice from a personal notion that the artist is “porous.” She unconsciously absorbs ideas and the underlying poetics of natural phenomena, and in combination with formal considerations about artmaking creates work that is a byproduct of what she considers “colliding forces.” Like a chemical or atomic reaction Lendvay intuitively adjusts the tactile and literal qualities of her materials and influences attempting to make sculpture and drawings that reveal what she believes to be the quality of existence.
Each of the works here are a combination of raw elements often hinged together with string, paper mâché or soft metals revealing a sort of temporariness as if the pieces were continuing to transform, and sometimes suggesting a longing to transcend their current state. A sculpture titled Caperay is a piece of an aluminum baking pan caked in what appears to be soot and tar. Gently twisted and pinched around three yellow, pink and grey sticks the standing pieces are adhered to a scrap of wood. The aluminum seems to float away from its joists in what seems to be a gesture of desire, or as Lendvay states, “a canopy of stars,” that is only kept in place by and an accidental gravity. A sort of drawing, Green and Fold is half of a green hanging folder with random black painting marks. On top of it is a scrap of folded envelope and umbrella spines fastened down with bits of dark paper and red thread. Faded, and seeming to dissolve in spite of its considered construction, Green and Fold,like Caperay, seems to reflect on its own state while waiting for the forces of entropy to take hold.
Elisa Lendvay has lived in New York City since 2003. A BFA graduate of Bennington College and the University of Texas at Austin, she received her MFA in sculpture at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2006. She has exhibited in group shows and project spaces in New York, and throughout the United States. She exhibited a solo project, “Fabled Agents,” at Moti Hasson gallery in New York in 2007. Lendvay was born in Dallas in 1975, and is part of growing group of artists in NY with Texas history and New England and New York training. This is her second solo exhibition in New York.
