Lynne Avadenka: Intimations

Lynne Av adenka | Intimations October 4 - November 23, 2019

K .O S S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T

LYNNE AVADENKA Intimations

Lynne Avadenka presses shapes into service. To look at her work is to ask what shapes mean, and to realize the potential of language, symbols, and form when wrested from their conventional usage. Things that were once agreed-upon become open to interpretation, a Tower of Babel that retains its structure, but leaves content in wild new arrangements. A language of marks, building empty cities, ready for people to read all kinds of things into them, which she always likes. Empty Cities, like Detroit itself, means something different in the eye of each beholder.

Avadenka grapples continuously with the tension between language as a mechanism for precise communication, and language as a set of forms in abstraction. She grapples with language the way a ballet dancer grapples with gravity—a graceful, liberating, and forceful gesture against the inexorable weight of easy recognition.

Within these leaps of interpretation, new languages emerge, unbound by assigned meaning: a language of ovals, a language of business type forms, jumbled Hebrew, algebra in Arabic.

Language as broken parts, city infrastructure, scattered meaning, reflected in bodies of work that Avadenka calls, variously: The Reunion of Broken Parts, Signs and Lines, Empty Cities, Ink Song.

The spirituality and cultural context of Judaism, a lens which focuses a love of mark-making so intense that it can lift up the tiniest fragments for reformation into a new whole. A cutting apart and refashioning of text as form, of meaning as content. A bookshelf flattened to two dimensions; a city reflecting its own skyline. A processing process, pushing shapes to their limit, literally, metaphorically, and repetitively. Multiple impressions, yielding multiple impressions.

If her typographical improvisations create sharp relief, Traces, a set of fuzzy photographic images printed on matte paper, serve as a kind of alter-ego. The pixelated play of overlapping shadow and light on the floor is dirty where Avadenka’s printwork is meticulous and clean, noisy where her Empty Cities are stoic, and as ambiguous in subject as her printwork is in meaning. Might these be modern mandalas, arranged on the floor to be scattered by light and motion? Avadenka’s work hinges so much on elements in balance, and these experiments with light and lens are the noirish, gestural id of life on the ground in Avadenka’s architecture of chaos and typographic structure.

Together, the works in this exhibition are a logical evolution of motifs Avadenka has built through years of practice—and like language itself, her work is adaptive, fluid, and endlessly rearranged around principles fundamental to communication in ways that transcend specificity and approach the enviable state of universality.

Sarah Rose Sharp September 2019

Sarah Rose Sharp is a Detroit-based writer, activist, photographer and multimedia artist. She writes about art and culture for Art in America, Hyperallergic, Flash Art, Sculpture Magazine, ArtSlant and others. Sarah was named a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for Art Criticism and is a 2018 recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Prize. Sarah has shown her own work in New York, Seattle, Columbus & Toledo, OH, Covington, KY, and Detroit—including at the Detroit Institute of Arts—with solo shows at Simone De Sousa Gallery and Public Pool. She is primarily concerned with artist and viewer experiences of making and engaging with art, and conducts ongoing research into the state of contemporary art in redeveloping cities, with special focus and regard for Detroit.

EMPTY CITIES 2019 26 inches x 12 feet wall installation letterpress printing / collage 5 collages

EMPTY CITIES VII 2008 10 ½ x 14 inches letterpress on Japanese paper

EMPTY CITIES V 2012 12 ½ x 14 inches letterpress on Japanese paper

EMPTY CITIES VI 2012 12 ½ x 14 inches letterpress on Japanese paper

REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS I 2011 11 x 26 inches intaglio with chine colle

REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS V 2011 11 x 26 inches intaglio with chine colle

REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS VIII 2011 11 x 26 inches intaglio with chine colle

REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS IX 2011 11 x 26 inches intaglio with chine colle

TRACES 4a 2018 17 x 22 inches photograph on archival paper

TRACES 5a 2018 17 x 22 inches photograph on archival paper

TRACES 14c 2018 17 x 22 inches photograph on archival paper

Lynne Avadenka is an American artist/printmaker. Her work focuses on ideas of text/ image/book/language/the Jewish experience. Avadenka was awarded the 2019 Fishman Research Award from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute. In 2018 she was part of an artist collaborative (Living Under W ater) working in Venice, Italy at the invitation of Beit Venezia, and this project will be exhibited in the 2019 Jerusalem Biennale. Among her awards are a 2009 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Residencies and teaching opportunities have taken her to Germany, Israel, Italy, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

AvadenkaĘźs work is exhibited and collected internationally, including the British Library, London; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Library of Congress, W ashington, DC; The New York Public Library; The Meermano Museum, The Hague, The Netherlands and The W atson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Avadenka has been active in the Detroit arts community since receiving a Master of Fine Arts from W ayne State University in 1981. In 2016 the UniversityĘźs Department of Fine and Performing Arts presented her with a Career Achievement Award. In 2013 Avadenka was named director of Signal-Return, a Detroit nonprofit letterpress print shop and community arts center.

Photo credit: R. H. Hensleigh

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