Lisa Bartleson "Hand Work"

The exhibition Hand Work at Nancy Toomey Fine Art poignantly declares artist Lisa Bartleson's new method where she embraces the tension between intimacy, corporeality, and material. Bartleson explores each focal point and its intersections, welcoming the inseparable and often uneasy relations found there. The crossroads of Hand Work's aesthetics centers the feminine, Bartleson's historic conceptual framing, yet expands towards abandon with plump, imperfect forms that are poised to resist the order and containment of the resin, expressing both power and vulnerability under the resin's sharpening opacity. This tension is amplified by the artist's sublime color palette, deep saturated pigments on organic cotton that at once suggest rootedness and blooming, surety and potential. Inside this duality, the viewer experiences the intensity of the form and color, which encourages the sensation of touch without contact. In Hand Work, there is no daylight between Bartleson as a maker and a mother, she revels in the possibility of cultivation made by the fertile tactility of the body that manifests through her hand. Inspired by Ruth Asawa's holistic practice that integrated mothering and artmaking, and by Georgia O'Keefe's sensual flora forms, Bartleson leans into the tension between them, sensuously abstracting flora as landscape into seductive, generative language. Painting with a highly reflective medium plays off the distance the resin demands, these pieces are to be looked at as embodied feminine matter, not to be objectified, or made static in the resin's magnification of the materiality Bartleson shapes, rather to be experienced in the complexity of women's work. Bartleson recognizes the power these intersections hold to express a formal language and the intangibility of women's bodies as intersections of cosmic and earthly becoming. Utilizing ovals and circles registers these convergences made more potent with color and volume. Being among these portals evokes the essential process of making as praxis. Bartleson's pleasure in affirming this methodology is seen and felt in the installation as an immersive exercise in hope as an extension of her innovative practice of rendering complexity. While joy is present, it does not subsume the sacredness of the works. It is yet another counterbalance Bartleson unearths to site the intimacies and entanglements of creating across tactile and visual aesthetic elements. Hand Work is an invitation and an education encouraging viewers to turn toward inhabiting process as the feminine divine and the freedom found in making.