Spotlight Artist

Letitia Quesenberry

South
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Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 My creative efforts focus on activating the boundaries of optical experience, digging into the relationship between perception and the limitations of memory. I cultivate a veiled, inscrutable aesthetic to accentuate nuance and destabilize apprehension.

In the “as of yet” series, my labor-intensive process involves building dimensional frames to house layers of divergent elements—semitransparent materials like beeswax, color gels, sanded plexiglass, or tinted resin combine with opaque layers of graphite or fluorescent paint interspersed with reflective textures like iridescent film, coal slag, or glitter. The formal visual structures of SX-70 Polaroid extend a jumping-off place borrowed from my favorite childhood camera. These instant images capture an ecstatic unpredictability—both an object and a singular magic snapshot—which dodge expectations and rarely offer an accurate depiction of vision. Squares bounded by rectangles contain recurrent shapes, patterns, and symbols: an imagined architecture for ephemerality and hypnotic bewilderment.

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