The file cabinet. Perhaps you have seen one on the streets awaiting removal, or maybe you yourself still own one stuffed with extinct hard drives and various SCSI cables? We are not long from the days when these flame-resistant metal drawers held vital information for and against us; just one of many cold-war-era technologies built to accommodate persistent atomic threat or perpetual bureaucracy.

 

Leslie Brack’s "Memorandum" returns us to these locked, blank facades, with their expressions of institutional control, information, and order. Their cold metal drawers, nonetheless, retain a reassuring materiality considering today’s more nefarious digital dossiers that extend invisibly into the unknowable infinities of corporation and state. Brack renders the steely surfaces of these monoliths with exacting realism on paper in watercolor, whose surprising lightness is luminous and eerie. These dented, scratched, and rusted portraits exhibit anthropomorphic qualities which remind us that, despite their historical nature, we are still confronted by their bureaucratic human progeny.

 

Leslie Brack is a painter living in Ithaca, NY. She holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a Lecturer at Cornell University. “Memorandum” was most recently exhibited at Ithaca College (2017). Previous one-person exhibitions include the Herbert F Johnson Museum (2015), and Cathouse FUNeral (2015). She wishes to thank the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Hambidge Center for the Arts for their support of the work in this exhibition. 

 

"Memorandum" constitutes the third exhibition in Cathouse Proper’s solo-solo series at 524 Projects. “Solo-solo shows” are one-person exhibitions that feature a major single statement by a contemporary artist of significance.