Lexier's Collaborative Portraiture Through Text Is Good Public Art

For today's class (Tuesday February 12th), I will be writing two journal blog posts to make up for the class I missed January 29th. This is the second.

Artists seen today: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,  Robert Smithson, Micah Lexier, Micheal Snow, Richard Serra, Eric Fischel, and Tagny Duff.


Micah Lexier, a Canadian artist working and living in Toronto, is tossing around very interesting ideas, revolving around themes that I myself have been thinking about lately as well.

First, that of time and the finiteness of our lives. His works "A Minute Of My Time", "A Portrait of My Grandfather"  and "Self Portrait As A Wall Divided Proportionally Between This Black Type..." make me think of "Lessons For Living", a "Tapestry" CBC radio show episode which I was lucky to discover about a week ago. I highly recommend it! Click on the link above to have a listen. For me, I took it both as a "new traditionalist" look at how we used to do things, looking for answers to current world challenges, and as an an opportunity to re-value golden age wisdom, discarding the modernist and capitalist understanding that everything new is better, mostly if not entirely because it is new.

Micah Lexier's self-explanatory installation "Self-Portrait As A Wall Divided Proportionally Between This Black Type..." at Concordia University. The same work has also been displayed at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Second, Lexier explores portraiture -sometimes personally and individually, and sometimes anonymously- with very pleasing results, something I am also currently working through artistically myself with a series of second-hand collaborative memory-portraits. I won't ruin the surprise by sharing my work quite yet, especially since it isn't resolved, but Lexier's installations definitely hit a close nerve. Particularly, I find his "Hall of Names" and "Ampersand" to be poignant as examples of collective portraits, "Hall of Names" speaking about its space (the subway station), and both helping define their spaces into multidimensional places shaped by the people that frequent them and their relationships.

"Ampersand" is a collaborative installation on the walls of Toronto subway stop Sheppard & Leslie. In this project, Micah asked locals to write the name of the station onto the tiles, which he later had installed.

"Hall of Names" a public installation at the National Trade Center in Toronto. Here, Lexier lazer cut the first 1000 anonymous submissions of names out of stainless steel and suspended them.

 Lastly, you'll also notice the prominence of text in his work. This, again, is something I quite like, since I am influenced by biographic and auto-biographic graphic novels, authors (such as Annie Ernaux), and artists crossing text and images such as Sophie Calle. A good story is a good story after all, whether you tell it through images, words, or anything else. And after Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" (see last post), it sure is nice to see Lexier master public art.