Tony Lewis: free movement power nomenclature pressure weight
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
June 6 - September 5, 2015
In his expansive drawing practice, Tony Lewis uses action and language to explore communication, presence, and authority. Focusing on graphite powder as a basic material element, his works emphasize the body through scale, tension, and imprint. pressure power movement free weight nomenclature presents a selection of Lewis’s new and recent work: large format glyph-based drawings on paper featuring Gregg Shorthand; a new iteration of a room-scaled !oor piece that takes on sculptural dimension; a single-action drawing with a tennis ball; and a nail-and-rubber band text drawn from what could be described as the artist’s most endeared source, Life’s Little Instruction Book. At Lewis’s request, and in keeping with the process-driven, non-hierarchical nature of his work, the word order of the exhibition’s title is not set, and changes regularly.
This grouping considers both the breadth of Lewis’s practice and the central concerns that drive it. His desire to keep things open, permeable, and tentative is evidenced in how the artist mines the multivalence of a source, a sentence, or a strategy. Rather than exhaustive, Lewis’s approach arrives at something more along the lines of conditioning. It is accumulative, has memory.
Considerations of Lewis’s work often lead back to the studio, a space for thought organized around a singular purpose: “to find new ways to make drawings.” (1) It is a total environment, where paper, objects, texts, and the ubiquitous graphite powder collide on every plane. The floor is primary; coated in a slick layer of graphite, it is a vehicle for mark making, “a tool the same way a pencil is a tool.” Laid out, layered, and dragged, the large paper surfaces that Lewis constructs gather impressions and shade. Gravity is at work in this system, but so is levity, as things rise to the surface and onto the walls. Words are clipped, pinned, written, pounded, and stretched. Everything is worn, spread out in various states of becoming and undoing. Yet, there is a consistency—a simplicity of matter—which gives an underlying sense of order. As Lewis describes: “In my studio everything has a role, everything has a place and a purpose for being there. The excess used gloves that are on the floor are viable drawings.”
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(1) All quotes by Tony Lewis are from an interview with Rose Bouthillier, March 2015.
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Excerpt from “movement power nomenclature weight pressure free,” Tony Lewis: free movement power nomenclature pressure weight, moCa Cleveland, 2015.
Photos from Tony Lewis’s studio:
