Activate: Market Street 8
Night & Day
January 27th – May 21st, 2016

Wendy Letven @ 75 Market Street

The installation, “Random Misfirings of the Brain” is constructed of branches and paper, painted red, orange and blue. These colors and it’s branching connective structure are borrowed from the visual vernacular of scientific models of the human circulatory system, a nod to the artist’s interest in natural science and information. The individual drawings that comprise it form a complex interwoven mass of an ambiguous shape that shifts and changes as one moves around it. It may be experienced as a drawing in physical space, or as shapes and lines woven together that form an impression of the rhythm and complexity of visual experience and noise spiraling, circulating and accumulating around and within us in perpetual states of change. For the artist it is also a metaphor for a growing collective consciousness that is a by-product of the information age. It’s component elements are parts of the artist’s own language of form inspired by natural and human-made patterns ranging from electrical systems, flow charts and highway interchanges to the natural branching patterns that make up everything from our vascular system to the coral reef and the fiber of the cosmos.

Wendy Letven is a visual artist with a background in drawing, painting and mixed-media. She has been a faculty member at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York City since 2007, teaching courses in the BFA Program and in Summer Programs. Wendy has exhibited her work in and around New Jersey at Aljira Gallery and at The Montclair Art Museum and in New York at the Bronx Museum, Momenta Art, Concepto Hudson, and other galleries. Wendy received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in Phildelphia, her home town and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. She has received many awards including a Workspace Grant from Dieu Donne Papermill in New York City and a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Currently, Wendy is an Artist in Residence at Gallery Aferro, in Newark, New Jersey.