ARTIST SUMMARY

Jane Lackey creates installations, drawings and sculpture that explore common ties of human interactions and unspoken communication. She combines everyday materials, reductive conceptual thinking, body-based systems, and sensory expression to orchestrate two- and three-dimensional works, which underscore Lackey’s affinity for paper, cloth, and other similarly pliable surfaces. Her recent site-specific installation, Enveloping Space: Walk, Trace, Think was presented at CCA, Santa Fe.

Lackey has exhibited artwork in venues including Wellcome Trust in London, Contemporary Art Space, Osaka, I Space, Chicago, Exit Art in New York, Tang Museum, Syracuse, Detroit Institute of the Arts and Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan, the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington.She has been awarded multiple grants, residencies, and fellowships, and her work has been included in The Map as Art by Katherine Harmon, Art Now by Edward Lucie-Smith and in a monograph released by Telos Publications in 2002.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art practice shifts between creating drawings and building site-specific installations. In both formats, I filter perception through transparency, accretion of materials, repetition of parts, choreography of movement and participation.

My drawings on translucent paper take on abstract characteristics of architecture and landscape schema. They articulate spatial relationships with the intricacy of body systems. As you look at them, you see through them. They have the familiarity of a place remembered, imagined. Map-like, their scale and delicate materials demand intimacy and time.

Aspects of these drawings are starting points for three-dimensional built environments in which you can walk—explore–respond. Essentially, qualities of my drawings predict architectural plan drawings and expand materially. Alignment of translucent scrim walls shift perceptions of what is seen and experienced as you move in, around and out of a central core. An enveloping atmosphere reduces exterior awareness and provokes a gestalt of participation: writing, marking, tracing, silence, thinking and unexpected calm.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

Currently in the studio, I am using my 2014 installation, Enveloping Space, Walk, Trace, Think as a springboard for realizing new work. I am reducing its main components to further align and edit relationships. This process of critical assessment, distillation, refinement and amplification is the starting point for new drawings and studies to explore themes of place, time, communication, motion and perception through layered space. Experiments with fabric, sound, gravity, transparency, structure, levels of viewer participation and digital interface will lead to new variations of built form and sensory experience.

Thomas Lehn will collaborate with me on this new project (working title—Spoken/unspoken) adding his design and architectural experience. Not yet having a specific “site” for this project, our models, drawings and material studies will respond to flexible spatial floor plans and portable building methodologies.
We want to maintain hands-on fabrication in combination with technical precision where needed.

Research and full-scale building of the installation will not be possible without materials, technology, tools and additional space for building or contracting outside fabrication. When possible, we will work with an assistant. Total money received from a SPREAD grant will be put towards supporting these s.

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You can view more of Jane Lackey’s work here.