Ithaca College

Please join us for an artist talk with Leslie Brack, who will speak about her practice and the work currently on display at the Handwerker Gallery on Thursday, October 5, at 6 p.m..

Memorandum: work by Leslie Brack

on view September 6-October 18, 2017

Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College

Leslie Brack’s delicate watercolors of old metal filing cabinets limn every distinguishing surface detail — pulls, labels, rust, dents, locks, shadows, scratches, etc. — of her thrift store subjects. The artist’s faithful renderings emphasis a frontal format, presenting viewers with the mute faces of closed drawers. As portraits of technological obsolescence that conjure, in her words, objects both “empty and accumulating”, what’s inside no longer matters. Cropped to the scale of tombstones, they are relics of an analog age, recalling a bureaucratic world of particle board cubicles, touchtone phones, and inboxes buried in paper. Brock’s light, nuanced hand, however, imbues them with a melancholic longing, an empathy for their exhausted purpose that transcends mere documentation. Her careful portrayals are doleful and solicitous as a result, transforming her subjects’ stolid, banal forms into symbols of loss and transience.

Leslie Brack is a painter living in Ithaca, NY. She holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently teaches art in the Cornell University Summer College.

*****

All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public.  The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.

*****