Leeza Meksin and Yevgeniya Baras: Hide
@ ADDS DONNA
4223 W Lake St, 422, Chicago, IL 60624
Opening Sunday, June 5th, from 3PM - 5PM
On view through Monday, July 11th
Skin as material and metaphor links the practices of Leeza Meksin and Yevgeniya Baras. The two met in New York in 2009. After exchanging studio visits, a playful dialog formed around issues of gender, materiality, and humor. Their shared concerns in worked surfaces, pattern, and texture, along with their immigrant histories, created a lively forum for development and conversation. Together for Hide, they will present works that explore the depths of superficiality.
In Yevgeniya Baras’s paintings, surface is treated with witch-like fixation. Holes are punctured, and then stitched back together. Marks are violently scratched through the paint like flesh wounds. And various foreign materials such as sticks, yarn, and bits of wood are unceremoniously stuck into the façade, like facial piercings. For Baras, the physicality of these gestures imbues her paintings with all the strength of feeling and tragic beauty of the body itself. Leeza Meksin’s sculptures and installations often involve draping, wrapping, and stretching objects with flamboyant fabrics, thus evoking the glitz and galmour of theater costuming. Like Baras, she has a distinct fascination with exteriors, though hers perhaps is more attuned to gaudy embellishment rather than corporeal transfiguration. Her use of culturally charged materials, particularly spandex, also lends a pronounced bodily humor to her already elaborate lexicon.
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