Working as a Drawing is a project thirty years in the making. It consists of 470 working documents, made between 1980 and 2012, culled from the artist’s files and archives. Lexier’s working process is characterized by collaboration, third-party fabrication, detailed correspondence, and careful documentation. Working as a Drawing amplifies these aspects of Lexier’s working history, presenting working documents as finished drawings. The bookwork consists of these newly discovered drawings, arranged in chronological order. Lexier is also a collector. He has archived almost every handwritten note, list, preliminary sketch, test, photocopy, letter, false start, indecipherable scribble, technical diagram, printing error, marked-up photograph, and construction document that he has generated. In 2012 he began the task of evaluating each one of these pieces of paper—now detached from their original use—looking for those he felt worked well as individual drawings. Lexier selected the best examples, focusing on those that were simple, awkward, evocative, or open-ended. Some were chosen for their apparent quickness, economy, or energy, others for their play between different types of marks. Each page functions as a discrete drawing, marking a small unit of time within three decades of working.
Published by Burnaby Art GalleryISBN: 978-1-927364-04-8
15.5×21.2 cm, 512 pp, full-colour offset, saddle-stiched, 2012
Edition of 500
$57.5CAD
More info: http://www.micahlexier.com
Available from: http://www.burnaby.ca/Things-To-Do/Arts-and-Heritage/Burnaby-Art-Gallery.html
Micah Lexier is a Toronto based artist whose work has been shown at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The New Museum, New York; The British Museum, London; Printed Matter, New York; Gitte Weise Galerie, Berlin; Musee d’art Contemporain, Montreal; the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario. He is represented in Canada by Trépanier Baer, Calgary and Birch Contemporary, Toronto.
The Burnaby Art Gallery operates as an art museum, gallery and community forum to explore and advance knowledge, appreciation and understanding of contemporary and historical visual art through exhibition, programming and collection services in traditional and non-traditional contexts and places in and outside the City of Burnaby.