Micah Lexier(Toronto)
Artist
Contribution
Leporello N° 02 by Micah Lexier, published by ll’Editions in 2021.
Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based artist whose activities include making, collecting and organizing. He has a deep interest in measurement, increment, found imagery and display structures. Lexier’s projects range in scale from limited edition multiples to massive public sculptures. He has presented over 100 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 200 group exhibitions and has produced a dozen permanent public commissions. In 2013 The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto hosted a fifteen-year survey exhibition of Lexier’s work entitled One, and Two, and More Than Two and in 2015 Lexier was honoured with a Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Lexier has produced dozens of publications including I’m Thinking of A Number, a 30-year survey of Lexier’s ephemera, published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and Call Ampersand Response, a 392-page bookwork made in collaboration with Michael Dumontier, which was published this year by Lars Mülller Publishers. Lexier’s work is in numerous public and corporate collections including The British Museum (London, England), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Sydney, Australia), and The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Lexier is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.
In a work in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, A work of art in the form of a quantity of coins equal to the number of months of the statistical life expectancy of a child born January 6, 1995 (1995), Lexier creates a portrait of a person using coins. A series of coins are neatly ordered in a box; in an adjacent box, loose coins sit in a gradually growing pile. Every month, another coin gets transferred from the first box to the other. Together, the 906 coins represent the life of an individual; the transfer of coins notates the passage of time. This work embodies a number of themes that are central to Lexier’s art practice: timelines; life span; mortality; and the ordering of things and their undoing.
Micah Lexier works in series; starting with a simple idea, he explores it in a systematic fashion. Series by Lexier include, Book Sculptures (1993), A Minute of My Time (1996-2000), Arrows (started 2004), Revelations (started 2005), and various collaborations with other artists and individuals. Lexier’s interest in ephemera adds another dimension to his practice. He makes posters, exhibition invites, T-shirts, and other art multiples to create parallel lives for his artworks, extending his art practice out of the gallery and into the world. In 2010, the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design published, I’m Thinking of a Number, a 30-year survey which documents this aspect of his practice.
David: Then & Now (2005) is an example of how Lexier extends ideas by reworking them. It consists of adjacent portraits of people named ‘David’. The portraits are of the same person taken 10 years apart, first in 1993 and then a decade later. In keeping with Lexier’s overall approach to artmaking, the work’s emotional tone is muted, yet it dramatizes the universal fact of aging. A temporary public artwork, the project was seen on bus shelters throughout Winnipeg. The work is a follow-up to an earlier piece by Lexier, A Portrait of David (1994), which presents 75 portraits displayed on a freestanding wall. Each portrait is of a male named ‘David’, arranged chronologically from age one through 75.
Lexier is often the subject of his work. He has said, “Everything an artist does is portraiture, in a way”. This is true of his on-going series, A Minute of My Time (born 1995), in which scribbles the artist makes over the course of a minute are transformed in a variety of ways, including: factory-produced water-cut metal sculptures, etchings, custom minted coins, lines sewn onto pieces of paper, spray-painted graffiti, and chalkboard drawings. The work memorializes the fleeting trace of the artist’s hand as a timeless monument.
A 2009 work, I Am the Coin, was commissioned by the BMO Financial Group. An example of the artist’s interest in serial forms of measurement, I Am the Coin, features a grid of 20,000 custom-made coins, each minted with a letter. Together the coins spell out a story, written by the writer Derek McCormack.
Leporello N° 02 by Micah Lexier, was published by LL’Editions in 2021. This artist’s book is part of LL’Editions flagship series; The Leporello Series. For the series, LL’Editions invite an international roster of celebrated artists to explore the possibilities of the accordion format. The series is continuously growing with new editions released yearly. To see all volumes in the series published to date, please follow this link: The Leporello Series.
