Painted in vibrant colors with Flashe vinyl emulsion on Tyvek, Feinstein mines the rich artistic tradition of text as image. This tradition stretches from medieval illuminated manuscripts and concrete poetry, to Paul Klee and Bauhaus typography; from Jasper Johns, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, and Ed Ruscha to graffiti writers like Retna. In Pages, Feinstein uses words as pictures. The words are largely drawn from the artist’s own writings—poems from the early 2000s. The layered texts are rendered intentionally illegible, creating rich tumbled surfaces that ask to be decoded. Her choice of text informs the shape, color, and temperament of each painting. In some, large uppercase letters form stacks of linking chains that create illusory depth. In others, entire lines of lower case text cascade across the surface of the work. Others seem an invented language and script, or suggest Hindi or Arabic alphabets.

This work is a striking departure from her four-year lyrical and painterly Succulent Living series begun after her move to LA from the Bay Area. Although the succulent paintings are often used as the initial ground for her new paintings, her palette has intensified as she layers the surfaces with texts, bringing attention to their abstract shapes as well as to their meanings.

Lea (Vaughan) Feinstein (b. Boston, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her studio community at Keystone Artspace is an inspiring springboard for this new body of work. She has taught at RISD, MICA, CCA, Georgetown University, and George Washington University. A widely respected art writer in the Bay Area, she wrote for Art News, Art LTD, SF Weekly, Artpractical.com, the Daily Serving. And in the past, she has also written for the Baltimore Sun; Link: A Critical Journal (Baltimore); Providence Business News and QuixArt Quarterly (Providence). She has exhibited her work in galleries in Washington, DC, Baltimore MD, Providence and Newport RI, and in San Francisco and the Bay Area, and is in many private collections. Public installations of her work are installed at NYU Neuroscience Center, The Lieber Institute of Brain Research (Baltimore), and have been exhibited at Stanford University. 

Exhibit is on view from March 19 - April 3

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 19, 4-7pm