Libby Wadsworth | Always InFormation

Always InFormation | Libby Wadsworth

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Always InFormation Libby Wadsworth

2 July 24, 2021 to November 7, 2021 | Danielle M. Knapp, Exhibition Curator | Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art | University of Oregon, Eugene

Table of Contents Director’s Foreword

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John S. Weber, Executive Director, JSMA

Acknowledgments

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Danielle M. Knapp, McCosh Curator

Curator’s Essay: Libby Wadsworth and the In Between

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Danielle M. Knapp, McCosh Curator

In conversation: Libby Wadsworth and John S. Weber

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Artist’s Statement

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Always InFormation Exhibition Checklist and Images

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Artist’s Résumé

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Installation view, Artist Project Space.

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Director’s Foreword The work of Libby Wadsworth forms and informs a thought-provoking reflection on the operations of words, language, photographs, and the painted image. This publication documents and complements her exhibition of 2021 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art of the University of Oregon. Presented in our Artist Project Space, it encompasses painting, printmaking, photography, and letterpress works.

As she states in the interview published in this catalogue, Wadsworth deliberately keeps her work intimate in scale. Yet her art is rich in implications, conceptually canny, and deeply considered. Dissecting both words and images, her work both demands and rewards active intellectual engagement on the part of viewers. Equally, it engages the aesthetic and sensual receptors of the mind, offering subtle visual pleasures and depths.

My thanks to Libby Wadsworth for her active participation in the planning for this show, including its elegant layout in our galleries, and the time and thought she contributed to my interview with her.

My thanks also to the museum’s McCosh Curator, Danielle Knapp, for curating the show and attending to all aspects of its preparation.

Thanks also to our installation crew, led by chief preparator Joey Capadona, and to Mike Bragg, the museum’s design services manager, for his work on this publication.

Finally, I’m happy to offer a salute to the museum’s former executive director, Jill Hartz, for originating this gratifying project previous to her retirement in 2019.

John S. Weber Executive Director

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Acknowledgments Observing, processing, experimenting, arranging: Libby Wadsworth has been busy during the last year’s period of collective crisis and reclusion. Always InFormation presents a selection of new prints and paintings created almost entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, accompanied by a sampling of earlier works made between 2010-2019.

The cumulative effect is soothing to the mind and eye. Yet, Wadsworth’s beguiling mashups of text, image, and idea remind us that such visual beauty is rarely so simple, or easily achieved.

Even the organization of her exhibition for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s Artist Project Space was shaped by the limitations and strange new realities of coronavirusera collaboration: Zoom sessions replaced studio visits.

Where spontaneous conversations once flowed, email chains proliferate. The spark of discovery that usually ignites during an in-person viewing between artist and curator was tended to instead via shared PowerPoint screens and website visits.

Now, it is profoundly gratifying to bring together these works in a physical space for this exhibition.

Collaborating with Libby Wadsworth under any circumstances is a delight, and we thank her heartily for her patience, flexibility, good humor, and warm conversation over the past 18 months as we navigated the planning of her exhibition and this catalogue together. The restrictions

placed on access to in-person meetings and art-viewings during the COVID-19 pandemic only increased our shared appreciation for these moments. We are all deeply grateful that visitors will now have the opportunity to enjoy Always InFormation in multiple formats: on site at the museum, via this publication, and in an interactive online tour. An interview in this catalogue between Wadsworth and John Weber, executive director of the JSMA, covers the multiple streams of influence, observation, and inquiry that shape Wadsworth’s practice and gives additional insight to the works presented here.

My special thanks to Jill Hartz, former executive director of the JSMA, for initiating this exhibition; John Weber and our colleagues Mike Bragg, Joey Capadona, Erin Doerner, Mark O’Harra, Jonathan Smith, and Debbie Williamson-Smith, for their fine work on all elements of this project; University of Oregon students and JSMA “Museum Students/Museum Stories” interns Sophie Ackerman and Anastasia Harper and their project supervisor Beth Robinson-Hartpence, for their excellent “Creativity in Quarantine” interview with Wadsworth in spring 2020; and Caroline Phillips Smith, former JSMA curatorial extern, for her invaluable editing assistance.

Danielle M. Knapp McCosh Curator

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Curator’s Libby Wadsworth Essay and the In Between

conversations between, 2021. Letterpress on vellum over photograph, 8 x 8 in. Courtesy the artist.

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Libby Wadsworth is foremost a painter, yet her practice spans multiple media, including drawing, letterpress printing, and photography. Using the tools of art making and reading, she teases open written language with thoughtfully composed visual arrangements and a grey and earth tone palette. “We use words all the time,” says Wadsworth, “rarely perceiving them as physical, aesthetic objects.” In her studio in Eugene, Oregon, Wadsworth ponders their fluidity.

Wadsworth began letterpress printing over a decade ago. She handsets each of the metal or wooden types into the chase, or steel frame of a printing bed. This aspect of the making is deeply satisfying in its physicality, and also allows her to think through the many ways in which text and images interrelate.

Hands on type, ink on metal, pressure on paper—Wadsworth notes the appeal of the dual tactility inherent to letterpress printing. In the first instance, the artist encounters the work through its creation, completely controlling the letters’ placement and printed depth on and in each sheet of paper.

In the second instance, the viewer engages the surface, a haptic encounter and appreciation for the artist’s choices in making, an understanding made possible by the eyes’ reading of the physical texture of the type. Wadsworth is especially attentive to this aspect in her works’ presentation. She will often install in grids or cloudlike groupings, varying size and materials throughout, and alternating between framed or unframed works.

Using movable type, one of the oldest printing methods, she embraces and upends its earliest, foundational purpose: to share written knowledge widely. Letterpress type is information in formation. Wadsworth considers this history and the labor required for letterpress printing as she makes her own works. The term “printmaking” naturally brings to mind the expectation of multiples. Yet, in Wadsworth’s printmaking, repetition’s most important role is not in the making of multiples but in the recurrence of elements that shift from one piece to the next.

Wadsworth also nods to the primary role of repetition as a pedagogical technique. She points to sentence diagrams from elementary school—the very purpose of which is to show how the grammatical parts of a language relate to a whole— as inspiration in both practical purpose and visual form.

Unlike those rigid tools, however, works like grasping move beyond pre-defined rules. This example demonstrates the elegant interplay of physical materials and visual structure in Wadsworth’s art. The darkened letters of gasp anchor the softened, floating letters of ring (an effect achieved by printing four letters on Dura-Lar and four others on the sheet of paper beneath).

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grasping, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches.

Courtesy the artist.

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InFormation, two from the larger series, 2020.

Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each).

Courtesy the artist.

Most of Wadsworth’s recent prints utilize this transparent material, a strategic choice that invites playful experimentation. What, she asks, happens in the eye and the mind when the same symbols sit on top of different backgrounds, in different arrangements? Letters operate as aesthetic objects as they float, break apart, or recede into space, pressed into the paper at different depths. In beta-bet, which Wadsworth describes as “an ongoing series of word portraits,” different textures and images shape the reception of each featured word. The works weave semantic satiation into the art­ viewing experience. Most people know that peculiar sensation of detachment or confusion that results from staring too long at a familiar word. Wadsworth delicately harnesses this strangeness.

A self-described list-keeper and collector of words, Wadsworth draws from commonplace sources, like news­ papers, as well as academic papers that rely heavily on phrases such as “therefore” and “in conclusion.” Inspiration for her landscape elements comes from various sources, including art history textbook illustrations and her own photographs of Eugene’s natural surroundings. Although the influence of traditional still life painting and other evidence of Wadsworth’s formal study of art permeate these works, her personal interpretation of Modernism is equally present.

The painted and collaged wordplay of the Cubists immediately comes to mind. In Robert Rosenblum’s essay “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism” for Picasso in Retrospect, the art historian writes of a “new-found typographical freedom” that makes possible “multiple verbal-visual reading[s],” especially of newspapers, most notably Le Journal, in the works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris.

Within Wadsworth’s body of work, the addition of imagery teases this question of letters as visual objects to an even greater degree. The InFormation prints from her larger fractures series use letters and syllables to frame different views of a broken teacup. These compositions test the brain’s power of recognition: each shuffles the building blocks of individual words—such as “in,” “or,” “on,” “mat,” “for,” “format,” and so on—playing the game of “how many parts can you find within the whole?” As letters begin to turn and flip, words are no longer words, but shapes. Whether or not Wadsworth intends viewers to look for a specific connection between each shuffle of i-n-f-o-r-m-a-t-i-o-n and its corresponding pile of shards, one naturally does. This effect is magnified by the interactions between series and individual pieces: in the exhibition, works are arranged to alternate between sizes, media, formats, and even dates. Multi-layered visual moments allow viewers to decide where to look and how to make meaning out of what they see there.

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Left: instability, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Opposite: an orange with leaves (detail), 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches. Courtesy the artist.

In other works, she further explores the concept of fractured ceramics, inspired by the Japanese art of mending broken pottery, kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery.” In this process, the repair is made with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. This leaves a permanent visual reminder of its repair, which reinforces the concept of beauty as the entirety of an object’s history. Cracks are celebrated rather than hidden. Wadsworth took her own approach to this concept with cups she shattered, repaired with simple Sculpey clay, and photographed: forms that became the basis of her realigning and amending series. A consideration of the unbroken cups that appear elsewhere in her works, either rearranged in photographs or painted whole on canvases, activates a natural inclination to compare and contrast. In these cases, the words and their configurations seem to take on additional significance. Each print invites a reading of the featured word as a strategy to understand the corresponding imagery, leaving the “right answer” completely up to the viewer to decide.

The painting an orange with leaves shows how Wadsworth’s combinations of text and color create frameworks for viewers’ interaction with a work. On this canvas, the titular orange is only presented as the letters O-R-A-N-G-E and the hue. The roundness of repeating “O”s, paint that streams down the surface like juice, and additional words as context clues—“an,” “with leaves”—conjure a very specific image in the mind’s eye. Wadsworth did not paint the fruit, nonetheless, the image emerges from the painting.

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Left: iterations 1-4, 2021. Charcoal with wax and encaustic on paper, 15 x 22 inches (each). Courtesy the artist.

Opposite: but also, 2020. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Her latest paintings galvanize words, still life objects, and natural motifs.

Whereas she explores the materiality of reading and seeing in her letterpress prints, in these oil and encaustic works Wadsworth turns her attention to the tension between realism and artistic interpretation. In a recent artist’s statement she explained: “The work engages the back and forth between word and image, seeing and reading, abstraction and representation, the ephemeral and the concrete refusing the idea that these categories are fixed and mutually exclusive. The focus becomes the grey area between categories, creating an opening for acceptance and inclusion.”

Wadsworth has described her approach to painting still life elements as a play on the traditional “Old Masters” style. Using the visual cues of seventeenth-century European oil painting, dishes and fruits hold weight against a variety of unexpected backdrops. A free-floating teacup in but also is an immediate focal point. Its placement encourages the eye to travel down the canvas in the same direction as streaks of black and grey-green paint, finding the words “but also” beneath. Wadsworth’s use of shadow for these stenciled letters, juxtaposed with her flattened leaf motif above them, further disrupts the understanding of three-dimensional space.

A group of charcoal, wax, and encaustic works made this year are iterations in title and purpose. The windswept look of these stenciled letters contrasts satisfyingly with the tight edges of Wadsworth’s letterpress prints. As an “e” or “r” reverberates on the page, the effect creates a similar sensation of depth as that achieved by Wadsworth’s layering in the prints and paintings.

Throughout Always InFormation, Wadsworth locates both the tension and the beauty that exists in our present moment and the spaces “in between” our words, the thoughts they conjure, and our lived experience. Language is always at the forefront, and the question of how it infuses and animates the mind. “This or that?” “Either, or?” Must we decide? Wadsworth rejects this binary. She gives her viewers both this AND that—never an either/or. Surrounded by Wadsworth’s images, it is possible to experience the liberating space between apparent certainties.

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In conversation: Libby Wadsworth & John S. Weber

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This conversation between Libby Wadsworth and John Weber was recorded over a series of sessions on Zoom and in person in Eugene, Oregon, in summer 2021.

John Weber: What are your first significant memories of art?

Libby Wadsworth: Mostly, my early memories of art are connected to architecture. My father and some of his college friends bought land on Prickly Mountain in Vermont in 1964 or 1965 and started to build these bizarre buildings that really were more like sculptures that you could sort of live in. It was the beginning of the design-build movement. I spent my early childhood weekends playing, and sometimes helping to build these unusual structures. It was great fun—and shaped, or warped, my ideas of what architecture could be.

JW: Architecture is very much about structure, and I look at your work now and I see a lot of interest in structure—words as components, putting things together, taking things apart, looking at different kinds of components and using them to build something. Did you study architecture in school?

LW: I didn’t; but I did take a lot of drawing classes and history of architecture classes. The college I went to was small and didn’t offer architecture classes per se. After college though, I spent two years in New York City working for architects. I worked for a big firm initially, as an assistant to an interior designer—helping with a giant office building being constructed in lower Manhattan right next to the World Trade Towers.

I helped with organizing office spaces, chairs, desks, and fabrics, that sort of thing. The big firm was very structured and hierarchical. Later, I worked for a small firm in Brooklyn, on a much more human scale.

I really enjoyed thinking about living spaces and about how to renovate old buildings to make them more contemporary and functional. But after two years I wanted to try something different.

I moved to Chicago to earn a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was so excited to be back in school doing something I really wanted to do. I took as many classes as I could each term. I felt like a kid in a candy store. After that, I applied to graduate school at the University of Chicago.

JW: What happened to your work in grad school?

LW: Grad school was about figuring out how to make text and image go together in ways that felt right to me. I was uncomfortable just putting words into paintings or drawings. I needed some kind of structure, as you say, to justify the move in my head. Somehow, I stumbled upon sentence diagrams. The diagram was perfect because it made the verbal, the sentence, into a visual object, and I could manipulate the form or the lines of the diagram to articulate space and depth in the painting. The diagonals could become like perspective lines.

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“I work in a variety of different media, but examining aspects of verbal and visual language is really at the core.ˮ

The texts in the diagrams were very literal at this point: they would tell you what you were looking at, and then I would try to match the text with an image I could paint. Like “the apple is on the table,” or “we can see a grove of trees in the distance.” At this point, I had to learn how to paint a realistic apple sitting on a table. I wanted the painted representation to be seamless, like an “Old Master” apple to go with the declarative sentence. The other thing that interested me about words in the diagram was that they became harder to read. The diagram upsets the flow of reading. The words kind of became more object-like than the highly rendered apples on the table. The apples were apples and you didn’t have to think about them. They became the thing you looked through. So next I painted them hovering off the table, and the words and images didn’t match. And it went on from there.

I began exploring different kinds of relationships between the words and the images.

Later, I began looking for other devices that push words to become more object-like. One such device I settled on and have used often is the grid.

I was looking at the work of Christopher Wool, Jasper Johns, and Glenn Ligon. Their work is all very different in terms of the content, but the grid is central.

JW: How would you characterize your work today?

LW: I would say that language understood very broadly is the material of my work and has been from the beginning. I work in a variety of different media, but examining aspects of verbal and visual language is really at the core. I like to take things apart, examine the components, and then try to put them back together in a different way, an unusual way that might make someone say, “I haven’t thought of it like that before.” It’s about process; one that engages me and that hopefully engages viewers as well.

I am also intrigued by the unresolved back and forth between words and images where words and letters become visual, and where images become more word-like or sentence-like. Places where you are reading a word but also seeing it at the same time. A kind of unresolved buzzing, or oscillation where things don’t settle into one or the other. The categories, whether you’re talking about words or images, abstraction or realism, an image, or a concept, they aren’t this or that. They are both this and that. The work is about the ongoing conversation between elements.

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JW: I was thinking about the title of the show—InFormation—and how you have spelled it. That intrigues me because it takes a word that conveys an essentially static concept, “information,” and that implies a static body of data, a body of facts, statistics or whatever. And then you ask us to think at the same time about something in flux, something that’s not fixed and not static. And that provocation strikes me as central to your work as a whole: it’s always about the process of cognition and cogitation as it relates to both seeing and reading. As you say, very much a both/and!

LW: Yes, definitely. The fun of it is the process, the thinking about an idea, the painting or making something about an idea. Physically making a painting or any artwork is a process; a thing literally in formation.

I always think about Alberto Giacometti and his portraits when I’m painting.

For me, his works are records of his thoughts and actions. Records of him looking at the model, making marks, looking again and changing the marks he’s just made, on and on until at some point he says, “okay, I’m done here.”

A similar thing happens when you are reading something—each time you read a poem or a bunch of words, you might come up with a different understanding of those words, a different take or point of view. This formation of meaning, or meaning in formation, is really at the center of my work.

JW: Your new works with photography and letters, with the overlay of translucent paper, have a spare, minimalist feel. But at the same time, you’re actually making a lot of demands on your viewers. You aim those pieces directly at our minds, and you’re asking us to complete them by participating in these acts of linguistic dissection and reassembly that each work proposes.

At least that’s one way of looking at the work—looking at them as something made for us, your viewers. But it could also be that that’s not really how you approach them. It strikes me that for you—even as you recognize how the audience will engage the possible readings they set up—you might be approaching the work as a fundamentally more personal investigation, a kind of linguistic play, or an essentially philosophical rumination on how language operates at the level of syllables and words, and the visual and the verbal. And so, I guess the question is to what extent, as you make the works, are you thinking about multiple viewers beyond yourself ? And to what extent are you simply immersed in the investigation itself ?

LW: I think this goes back to the both/and situation where initially it’s me playing around with words, and asking how many words are in this word, or how can I arrange these broken cups in an interesting way? And then, how do the cup fragments relate to this pile of words? Are there larger connotations or suggestions being made beyond the level of the teacup and word? I definitely hope and want viewers to engage with this process: to think about taking things apart and then putting them back together in different ways; to solve problems in different ways. And it works both from the maker side and from the viewer side.

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JW: Where did the teacups come from?

LW: Well, the cups and still life objects in general have been with me for a long time. At first, I turned to still life because I was trying to learn how to paint realistically, or at least in the style of an Old Master.

How do you paint something to look three-dimensional and luminous? What is a glaze? And how does it work? The still life objects were right there in my studio, or at the grocery store. I didn’t have to pay for a model or brave the Chicago winter to paint outdoors. I could also go to the Art Institute and study real Old Master paintings and then run back to my studio and try to make something that approximated what I had been looking at. And I say approximated! But over time, my still lives became more convincing. So initially, I chose still life for practical reasons.

I also began to think about still life through the lens of domesticity and the idea of women’s work. I was choosing still life objects to engage with and think through issues of being a woman artist, a mother, an earner, and a painter in a male-dominated art world; what kinds of statements could I make with still life, and how could I engage the genre by inserting myself in it, while altering the language in some way?

So, to me teacups suggest a kind of hyper-domesticity and the ritual of English tea. I think of images of the “proper home” with a woman of privilege and means presiding. I felt I could use the teacups to comment on this language or structure. And then one day, I dropped a cup and it broke into pieces.

JW: I love that…the broken cups came from life, from a broken cup in your life. How about the layering in the new pieces? You have always had layers in your painting, too, but I’m curious about how you came to use the Dura-Lar, the translucent paper.

LW: A few years ago I had the opportunity to have a show with Eugene Contemporary Art. For that show, I made a large installation that included around 30 letterpress pieces along with drawings and paintings all based on the sequence of the alphabet. The letterpress pieces were all on white paper, in a set size. After making those, I felt like I’d run out of things to do with words and letters alone. Adding a layer or two of transparency seemed like a new approach. I could highlight different words by putting some behind and putting some on top. Danielle, in her essay, talks about GRASPING. This is one of the first pieces that I made with the Dura-Lar right at the beginning of COVID last March. This word has many resonances: the idea of grasping what we were heading into, but then also gasping for breath, and then the words asp and ring. The transparencies literally add another layer to the process.

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JW: There’s something that happens when I look at a lot of these pieces: they suck me into this contemplative dimension where I think about language and I think about its operations on us and the extent to which we use it and the extent to which we inhabit it.

LW: Exactly. Language is constructed by us and it, in turn, constructs us, our thoughts and ways of representing the world. It’s an ongoing process of change and formation.

JW: When I was in your studio a long time ago, before COVID, I noticed a number of books of artists who have incorporated language in their work to one degree or another. And you have mentioned Jasper Johns in particular. I’m curious as to what came first, whether you moved into language and then started noticing artists who were working in language or how that unfolded? And Johns also, of course, works with found objects—the American flag, beer cans, his stencils, and so on.

LW: I have always admired Johns’s work, for so many reasons—the letters and words, and his use of encaustic paint. Encaustic is a wax-based paint which goes on in liquid form (melted wax with pigment).

It dries and hardens almost immediately. The brush strokes are literally captured at the moment they hit a surface. The strokes become traces or embodiments of the artist’s hand moving the brush. When Johns paints letters with encaustic, the letters become extremely object-like and tactile, almost sculptural. I think my obsession with the physicality of letters was ignited by studying his work. And, ultimately, that led me to letterpress in my quest to find other media that can convey or embody the objectness of text.

Another artist who really struck me early on was Glenn Ligon, particularly his early black-text-on-whiteground paintings quoting the words of Black writers. Through his repetition of phrases and words, painting the same ones over and over in black paint stick, the surface builds up, becomes thicker, making the words literally more physical and present as you read down the painting.

The other painter whom I look to often is Jenny Saville, a contemporary British painter. You had one in the museum recently.

JW: Yes, it was of a face, and just gorgeous.

LW: With her work, it’s the back-and-forth between realism and abstraction, the juxtaposition of paint used to render a feature transparently and the use of paint for paint’s sake calling attention to itself as a physical medium. Her earlier work is often based on photographs. She puts the photographs together in such a way that it makes you conscious of the constructed nature of her image, and of the human figure.

She makes very conceptual figure paintings.

JW: Your work is in some ways fundamentally conceptual art. But it often has these elements that are not what one thinks of as conceptual art—still life painting in particular—but you’re using it in a conceptual way.

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LW: Definitely. My work often offers the viewer a “pretty” image to begin with, something you know already that might attract you. But the closer you get, the more you see there are other things going on. Conceptualism comes in the guise of a pretty picture.

JW: Let’s talk about the found object in your work, because to me that’s a through-line…working with things that are already there in some way. You have words as givens, as found objects that you then take apart and put back together. And when you take them apart, you’re asking us in a way to “unknow” them and then “reknow” them. But it seems to me that we could look at the notion of the still life as another given, we can look at that tradition as another found object that you also take apart and layer and play with and use as a way to ask us to think about perception and thinking and cognition.

LW: Yes exactly. The found object is an interesting way of thinking about the elements I choose to analyze or take apart. I haven’t really thought of those elements in that way. Thank you.

I draw a lot from the language of art history which I think of as a found visual vocabulary or grammar in a sense. I like borrowing and manipulating different aspects from this vocabulary in order to make the familiar unfamiliar.

For example, in this exhibition there is a diptych called inherit. I have painted three objects stacked on top of each other in a realistic Old Master style. They are believably present on a ledge, though precariously stacked. Both panels have the same three objects but stacked in a different order. The word inherit appears on each panel as well, though broken apart into components—“in her it” on one and “it in her” on the other.

The words are rendered three dimensionally and are stacked to behave and mirror the still life objects. These are spare paintings and refer to minimalism as a style. They are also conceptual. All of these styles, or found objects, are mixed up and juxtaposed, hopefully prompting viewers to ask questions about how we engage with and think about aspects of language, how the languages we have created shape us and how we can continually shape and change these languages.

JW: So sometimes we’re looking at the window and sometimes we’re looking through the window.

JW: Do you ever have an urge to paint great big pieces?

LW: No. I think on some level it’s intimidating. On another level, I feel like that’s what guys do. I’m also more interested in the small, intimate, quiet thing that might speak more powerfully than it appears. And then the other practical rule is that it has to fit in my car.

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JW: Right! John Baldessari once commented that all of his early work was the size it was because that was the biggest canvas that would fit in the back of his van. It also reminds me of something one of my teachers, David Antin, once said to his students: real artists are always practical—you have to make something you can actually make, something that you have the resources to make, and not just dream about things that are too big or too expensive, or that you don’t actually know how to make.

Now, these works definitely have an intimacy, but you were talking about COVID, and I see other social resonances in this work. I can’t help but notice the sense of brokenness, fragility. Can you talk more about that?

LW: For me, the broken cups have become representative of how broken our society has become in terms of our responses to the COVID pandemic, our fractured politics, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The systems are broken and they need to be reformed and reconfigured. These pieces have been and continue to be a way for me to personally express this feeling of brokenness and to begin to think through or think about metaphors for solutions.

Through breaking will we be able to break through?

JW: Thank you, Libby, I think that is an excellent stopping point, underlining the questions your work asks us to contemplate. This has been wonderful. Thank you for your work.

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Artist Statement My creative practice explores intersections between visual and verbal language systems that shape and frame our perceptions and understandings. This investigation fuses traditions and assumptions of domestic still life and conceptual art across paintings, drawings, and letterpress prints. The work activates dialogues between word and image, seeing and reading, abstraction and representation, object and idea, refusing to accept these categories as fixed and mutually exclusive. I am interested in the unresolved spaces in between categories where multiple readings and identities co-exist. To investigate these spaces, I utilize the modernist grid, still life objects, contrasting painterly styles, and words that break apart into other words. I often work in series where chosen elements—still life objects, letters, and words—repeat and alter across pieces.

Multiple iterations become catalysts for reinterpreting, renovating, and coaxing the familiar into unexpected places. This project posits reading as an active and collaborative process and where meaning is constructed from mixed, disparate components.

During this pandemic year, I began adding photography to my practice, first as an activity of distraction during the months of lock down, and later, I began developing photographic imagery to combine with the letterpress prints. This new combination of media has opened new channels of investigation and image construction.

I have been working on two bodies of work over the past year and a half: fractures and greenery.

The first series, fractures, combines photographs I have taken of broken and reconstructed teacups with letterpress text arrangements. These pairings express both cultural collapse and the possibility of reimagining, of reconstructing a way forward using the wrecked shards left behind. The pieces are meditations on the creative process of breaking down and reassembling, examining subjects in formation.

The second series, greenery, places still life objects and stenciled foliage in lush, painterly environments. The objects and snippets of foliage are suspended in a nowhere, in between place.

The superimposed texts are transitional phrases used to join clauses of sentences. These pieces join visual representations of nature and culture, arresting both in a frozen moment meant to evoke the suspension of pandemic lockdown and our collective inaction on climate change.

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L i b by Wa d swo r t h Artist Project Space (exterior room): InFormation 1-5 , 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each) bread and butter, 2018. Encaustic over letterpress on paper, 9 x 9 inches (each)

Works in the Exhibition

Comes and Goes, 2016-21. Oil on canvas, 50 x 30 inches Over and Over, 2016-21. Oil on canvas, 50 x 30 inches Orange, 2016. Oil on canvas, 2 panels with frames, 12 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches, each iterations 1-4, 2021. Charcoal with wax and encaustic on paper, 15 x 22 inches (each) between, 2021. Letterpress on vellum over photographs, 8 x 8 inches (each) Elucidate, 2010. Encaustic on canvas with thread, 20 x 16 inches an orange with leaves, 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches blend 1-4, 2016. Charcoal on paper, 22 x 15 inches (each)

Artist Project Space (interior room):

All works courtesy the artist.

apart, 2021. Letterpress on photograph with fabric and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches border, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph with window screen and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches close, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph with fabric and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches Inherit, 2016. Oil on canvas (2 panels), 24 x 8 inches (each) artifice, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches edifice, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches

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contingent, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 7 inches instability, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches Solid, 2016. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches abounds, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches grasping, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches facet, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches winnow, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches adrift, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches suspends, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches still stands, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still keeps, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still holds, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still remains, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches breach, 2020. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 8 inches cleave, 2020. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 8 inches whereas, 2021. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches through breaking, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches reform, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches reconfigure, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches moreover, 2021. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches realigning 1-3, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each) monument 1-2, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each) amending 1-4, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each) artifact, 2019. Oil on canvas, 34 x 12 inches memento, 2019. Oil on canvas, 34 x 12 inches underbrush, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches background, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches but also, 2020. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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InFormation 1-5, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each)

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bread and butter, 2018. Encaustic over letterpress on paper, 9 x 9 inches (each)

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Comes and Goes, 2016-21. Oil on canvas, 50 x 30 inches Over and Over, 2016-21. Oil on canvas, 50 x 30 inches

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Orange, 2016. Oil on canvas, 2 panels with frames, 12 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches (each)

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iterations 1-4, 2021. Charcoal with wax and encaustic on paper, 15 x 22 inches (each)

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between, 2021. Letterpress on vellum over photographs, 8 x 8 inches (each)

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Elucidate, 2010. Encaustic on canvas with thread, 20 x 16 inches

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an orange with leaves, 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches

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blend 1-4, 2016. Charcoal on paper, 22 x 15 inches (each)

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Inherit, 2016. Oil on canvas (2 panels), 24 x 8 inches (each)

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artifice, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches

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edifice, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches

contingent, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 7 inches

instability, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches

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Solid, 2016. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches

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abounds, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches

grasping, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches

facet, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches

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Opposite: suspends, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

winnow, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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adrift, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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still stands, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still keeps, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still holds, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches still remains, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 8 x 11 inches

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breach, 2020. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 8 inches cleave, 2020. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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whereas, 2021. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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moreover, 2021. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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through breaking, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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reform, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches reconfigure, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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realigning 1-3, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each)

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monument 1-2, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each)

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amending 1-4, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each)

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artifact, 2019. Oil on canvas, 34 x 12 inches 62

memento, 2019. Oil on canvas, 34 x 12 inches

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background, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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underbrush, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph, 11 x 8 inches

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apart, 2021. Letterpress on photograph with fabric and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches

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border, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph with window screen and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches

close, 2021. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photograph with fabric and embroidery, 11 x 8 inches

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but also, 2020. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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Libby Wadsworth

www.libbywadsworth.com | @libbywadsworth

Solo Exhibitions 2021

2018 2017 2016 2010 2009 2006 2003 2002 2001 2000 1998

1997 1996 1993

1992

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Always InFormation, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR an alphabet, Eugene Contemporary Art, Eugene, OR iterations, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR collection, Laurel Fisher Gallery, Eugene, OR this and this, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL threads, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR vestiges, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR ephemera, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID Lane Community College, Eugene, OR Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL Options 45: Libby Wadsworth, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Selected Group Exhibitions 2021 2020

2019

2018

2015

2014 2013

2012 2007

2005

2004

2003

2002

Studio Dialogues, Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR Eugene Biennial, Karin Clarke Gallery, Eugene, OR Snippets of Eugene, with Eugene Printmakers, City of Eugene Cultural Services The Distance Between Us, BRIDGE Exhibition, City of Eugene Cultural Services Group Show, Umpqua Valley Art Association, Roseburg, OR Artworks Northwest, Umpqua Valley Art Association, Roseburg, OR Around Oregon Annual, The Arts Center, Corvallis, OR So Sew Show, the Vestibule, Seattle, WA No Longer Supported, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY Around Oregon Annual, The Arts Center, Corvallis, OR Eugene Biennial, Karin Clarke Gallery, Eugene, OR Pacific Northwest Art Annual, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Reinventing the Helm, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Water Mill, NY Sarah Grew and Libby Wadsworth Open Studio, Eugene, OR Living Legacies: JSMA @ 80, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR Art Miami, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Miami, FL A Dose of Reality: Limor Gasko, Jill Grimes, Libby Wadsworth, Kolok Gallery, North Adams, MA 23 x 9, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR Contextual, Maude Kerns Art Center, Eugene, OR North by Northwest, University Art Gallery, California State University, Chico, CA A Sharp Eye, Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL The Mayor’s Art Show, Jacobs Gallery, The Hult Center, Eugene, OR Megan O’Connell and Libby Wadsworth, Jacobs Gallery, The Hult Center, Eugene, OR Stitch By Stitch, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

2001 Underfoot, American Consulate, Sao Paulo, Brazil. (traveling)

Mostly Black and White, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

Still Life, Heathman Hotel, Portland, OR 2000 Summer Reading, Anne Reed Gallery, Sun Valley, ID

Gallery Artists, Zolla Lieberman, Gallery, Chicago, IL 1999 Gallery Artists, Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID 1998 On Paper, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

New Art of the West, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN 1998 Interior Pauses: Northwest Contemporary Realism, Maryhill

Museum of Art, Goldendale, WA 1997 Gallery Artists, Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID 1996 The Mayor’s Art Show, Jacobs Gallery, The Hult Center,

Eugene, OR

Narrative Flow, Columbia College Center for Book and Paper

Arts, Chicago 1995 Pulp Fictions: Works on Paper, Gallery A, Chicago, IL

Gallery Artists, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL 1994 The Art of Language, The St. Paul Companies, St. Paul, MN

Contemporary Still Life, North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand

Forks, ND 1993 Is Poetry A Visual Art?, Indiana State University, Terra Haute, IN

Benefit Auction Exhibition, The Renaissance Society,

Chicago, IL 1992 Not Working In L.A., Nomadic Site, Pasadena, CA

Focus, Chicago International Art Exhibition, Chicago, IL

Sicut Malum Est, Swift Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1991 conTEXTual, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Profiles 1: Four Chicago Artists, Randolph Street Gallery,

Chicago, IL 1990 M.F.A. 1990, The David and Alfred Smart Museum, Chicago, IL

All-Illinois Graduate Art Exhibition, Northwestern University,

Evanston, IL

Education M.F.A., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL B.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL B.A., Williams College, Williamstown, MA An artist member of Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR An artist member of Eugene Printmakers Lives and works in Eugene, Oregon

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Published by

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art 1430 Johnson Lane 1223 University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon 97403-1223 541-346-3027 jsma.uoregon.edu

ISBN 978-0-9995080-9-1 Libby Wadsworth | Always InFormation is made possible with the support of the Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art and the generous contributions of our JSMA members.

Danielle M. Knapp and John S. Weber, Editors Susan Mannheimer, Copyeditor Mike Bragg, Designer Photography unless otherwise indicated by Libby Wadsworth Photography by Jonathan B. Smith: 2, 72 Photography by Mike Bragg: 4, 6, 16, 20-21, 22, 25, 26, 70-71

Printed through the Wethinkink

© 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.

The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication is available in accessible formats upon request.

Installation views, Artist Project Space, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, August 2021 72

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9 780999 508091

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art University of Oregon $20.00

Jacket Image: InFormation 1-5 (details), 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each)

$20.00 ISBN 978-0-9995080-9-1