still life

Lesley Vance
born 1977, Milwaukee, WI
lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

"The works start out with still lifes—I set up a still life in a dark box in my studio. I have a collection of organic materials, like rocks, shells and horns-sometimes I use a chunk of ceramic. I do each painting in a day, so [the paint] all sits as one layer. It's strange, because the paintings almost look like collage. But I want the image to all be in one layer, so you can't trace the steps backward to the original still life. They only work as their own reality. And yet, they contain moments of the original still life: shadows that don't make sense, but that were there in the beginning."
She said that someone told her that being in the Whitney Biennial was like winning the Super Bowl. I had to explain to them that it's nothing like the Super Bowl. I had to keep telling her it wasn't a competition."