want and fear: Emily Legleitner, MFA Printmaking

want and fear: Emily Legleitner, MFA in Printmaking

October 10 – November 03, 2023

FAB Gallery
Main Floor

Reception

University of Alberta faculty, staff, students and invited guests
Thursday Nov 2
7:00–9:00pm
FAB Gallery 

About the Show

want and fear, is about mortality, choice, and longing as those constructs relate to the human experience and our contemporary age. More specifically, this body of work explores how these themes manifest in private and personal experiences, told through auto-biographical visual narrative. The imagery originates from spontaneous performative play – I ‘sketch’ in front of a camera with a remote shutter and capture reenactments and responses to feelings of intense emotion. I combine these self-portraits with exaggerations of possible realities, distorting familiar domestic objects to challenge comfort, evoke tension, and create a sense of teetering between conflicting emotions. Because many of the works are made in the artist’s image, want and fear presents microcosmic manifestations of anxiety and vulnerability from an embodied feminine and queer perspective, in varying degrees.

But, want and fear also speaks to anxiety on a macrocosmic level. The work deals in contradictions – as anxiety and choice-making are often accompanied by contradictory feelings. Home can be comforting and confining; love can be wonderfully joyous and terribly painful; labour and work can be rewarding, and at the same time feel distracting, keeping us from things we’d rather be doing. Through printed imagery and installation art, I present moments when the familiar edges towards the unnerving, a sensation that has become more familiar to many of us as we navigate our current and complex global reality – saturated with a constant stream of information, largely devastating, highlighting our dying planet, patterns of genocide, and self-inflicted extinction. As we grapple with uncertainty in the wake of several global crisis and the intimidating, often intangible, vastness of it all, our sense of “normalcy” has been shaken, reinforcing our predisposition to dwell on the fleeting nature of life and longing – the essence of this exhibition, want and fear.

About the Artist:

Emily Legleitner is an MFA student in printmaking at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Her research examines auto-biographical experiences and emotions associated with anxiety, mortality, choice making, and the human condition. Born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania in 1996, Legleitner was raised in Flint, Michigan where she maintains a studio and residence. Legleitner works as the Curatorial Assistant at the Flint Institute of Arts, the second largest museum in Michigan. Legleitner’s studio practice is based in print media, and the expanded fields of fiber arts, ceramics, and metals. Her imagery is informed by lens-based inquiry, performance, and the body – using self-portraiture to share auto-biographical narratives and self-reflections. Legleitner received a BFA in Studio Art from Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in 2019. Her work has garnered critical acclaim throughout North America, winning notable awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, Best in Show at Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC) 2021 Prints exhibition, and Best in Show at the 58th Annual Greater Michigan Art Exhibition (2019), among others. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and has been published in the London-based print journal Printmaking Today (2018). Recent solo exhibitions have included BWAC, Brooklyn, New York; Crooked Tree, Traverse City, Michigan; and Buckham Fine Arts Gallery, Flint, Michigan. Legleitner was an artist in residence at the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland) in 2019.

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