At the heart of her work are serious questions:
How do we feel about war, and the endless succession of soldiers being dispatched, swallow-like, to battle? What do we make of the metaphorical Kristalnachts of human history that would obliterate the human spirit? What crimes of the heart, of omission or commission do we carry?
“Art making is her way of responding, both publicly and intimately to the ongoing predicament of our lives,” writes the art critic Rosetta Brooks, who has followed Lemieux’s work for decades.
“Theologians would describe this predicament as the suspension between our fear of damnation and our hope for exaltation; existentialists might summarize it as the dilemma posed by the fact that we have bodies that die and minds that resist that end; and absurdists in the tradition of Beckett might summarize it as the precarious ethical imperative of 'I can’t go on. I must go on.' "
Catching up with Lemieux in her Allston, MA, studio not too long ago, the artist didn’t offer any linear clues. 2011 was a challenging year for even the most stalwart of workers between ungodly summer temperatures that turned the unairconditioned Carpenter Center at Harvard into an inferno to the deaths and memorial services for two close family members who have come and gone.
But, it would seem, her response has been to keep working; last fall she used the coveted time from a sabbatical not only to accompany and reinstall the retrospective in Kalamazoo, but to refine a new series of installations that will be showcased in her next show, Unfinished Business.
For the past year she has been scouring eBay for the diminutive hand-painted people, animals and accessories from W. Britain’s metal model farm that are being mounted on a labyrinth in a work entitled Back to The Garden. A large installation, in the shape of a cross, dominates the floor space. Filled with found objects she has carted across the street from her old studio, it has captured the imagination of the man who maintains the building, she tells me, who pauses to look at it whenever he arrives to clean. Dressed in work clothes and boots, a pack of cigarettes at the ready, she is no motorcycle babe, but she exudes a bit of a Torrington swagger. In her 54 years, there have been the vastly creative times, when the work has been prolific and there have been the fallow times, when Lemieux concedes she has persevered like a penitent in her personal wilderness.
To Mario Diacono, curator for the Maromotti Collection in Regio, Emilia, Italy, who represented her when he had a Boston gallery, Lemieux has outlasted the many of her contemporaries and become a leading postmodernist thinker. At this stage in her career, he said in a recent telephone interview, “the question should be not whom is Lemieux influenced by, but whom she is influencing.“
Like Tim O’Brien’s soldiers in his book, The Things They Carried, Lemieux continues to issue field reports. There will be emotional baggage. And very much in the vein of the late great humanist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, who coincidentally finished an illustrious career at Harvard, she would have us search for meaning.
Sculpture: Potential Snowman, 2001. Hydrocal with pigment (constructed spheres and cast forms), Formica on wood (platform); 22 x 36 x 36 inches overall. Private collection, New York
The Strange Life of Objects, co-curated by Lelia Amalfitano and Judith Hoos Fox, opened at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2010, took center stage at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, MA, from April through mid-October 2011, and will run at the Kalamazoo Art Museum through March 4. Unfinished Business, curated by Amalfitano, opens at Harvard’s Carpenter Center on February 14.
©2012 Kristin Nord for SeniorWomen.com
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