Lee Relvas

Some Phrases

Callicoon Fine Arts

New York, 49 Delancey Street

Lee Relvas’ equally corporeal and industrial sculptures merge ephemerality with fortitude. Curved, bent, and contorted, her construction-grade plywood sculptures convey spectral fluidity, while their utilitarian materials present them as solid and rigid. Relvas’ Callicoon Fine Arts exhibition Some Phrases aptly includes a group of sculptures that combine abstraction and human form with titles that define certain human acts. Their slight resemblance to silhouettes can only be viewed from certain angles; otherwise, from different perspectives, they pose as serpentine lines either drooping downwards or evaporating towards the ceiling. 

Lee Relvas Deciding 2017 plywood, wood filler, epoxy putty, polyurethane 73 x 33 x 32 inches 185.4 x 83.8 x 81.3 cm

Connected with epoxy putty, which is commonly used in plumbing, lines of plywood pieces transform into meditations on simplicity embedded in life. With titles such Adorning, Hiding, Mourning, Withholding or Offering, they speak to basic human experience in the most simplistic sense, stripped from visual or mental chaos. “My sculptures are both outline, drawing mass and volume by demarcating space within it, and skeleton, imagining mass and volume building upon it. I want to give just enough information to show how the body might move, cross their legs, poised to speak.  I want each object/body to speak through what it does instead of what its surface looks like.  The sculptures change as the viewer walks around them so that the viewer’s translation of gesture is always changing based on their position in the room,” explains Relvas in an interview with Hallie McNeill published on Lookie-Lookie journal in December, 2016.

The exhibition runs through May 21, 2017.