Biography
“A Trumpet for Hickory” production still: (from collaborative project with Kristina Faragher, “12 From the Underground”)
Curt LeMieux is an interdisciplinary artist who has shown nationally and internationally and whose works appears in numerous private collections. Exhibition venues and events include: The Sixth International Festival of Images in Manizales, Colombia, Luna International in Berlin, Germany, The Berkeley Video and Film Festival in Berkeley, CA., The Santa Monica Museum of Art in Santa Monica, CA., Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA., The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA., Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA. He received an M.F.A. degree in 2001 form the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA with an emphasis on in Drawing and Installation. LeMieux also holds a B.F.A. degree in Painting and an M.A. degree in Sculpture from the University of Wisconsin at Superior.
Statement
Drawing is the foundation of my practice. Through the execution of hundreds of meditative sketches, I arrive at a set of personalized marks and symbols that lead me to materials and content. In sculpture, painting, assemblage, site-specific works, video, and performance installation, my goal is always to articulate a visual language that promotes inquiry into human behavior and ecology. This archeological approach, wherein layers of meaning are shifted and renegotiated, allows a rehearsal of the ways in which meanings might develop, in which behaviors become codified and understood. Using partially recognizable imagery—abstract and repressed images of humans, animals, architectural and machine like forms—and questionable materials ranging from blobs of paint and glue to non-art materials, such as socks and sticks and other unlikely but charged substances, I reopen their associative meanings, allowing the viewer to explore origins. I deliberately efface or remove large portions of the format of my works, scaring them with staples, nails, tacks, blades, screws and other dulled objects. The brutal and direct reduction of my format reinforces the repressive process in cultural memory, having the effect of coaxing one back toward the moment of definition when image "A" might have been placed alongside "B". Because the rationale for these alignments may be only partially known, or perhaps subterfuge for other meanings, the viewer has the task of deciphering, and in the task must cycle through personal and cultural memory for an answer that, through the processes of erosion, can’t be entirely known. It’s in the not knowing, the attempt at knowing, that a host of real possibilities occur. These images replicate themselves and reconnect the viewer to these speculative early moments in which the original memory pictures might have been, even temporarily, joined and propagated or dismembered and buried.
