Novemeber 4, 2022 - December 22, 2022

60 Lispenard Street

P: 212 925 4631

New York, NY

Lee Relvas: Frisson City

LYSH-Install1
LREL2022-install-04

Installation view of Lee Relvas Frisson City

Canada is pleased to present Frisson City, Lee Relvas’s first exhibition with the gallery. Relvas’s series of wall works and sculptures on pedestals are comprised of sanded-down segments of construction-grade plywood that the artist joins together with epoxy putty, a home improvement paste that is commonly used to fix leaky pipes. Under Relvas’s labored care, the sculptures evoke skeletal creatures with stories to tell, further animated with other utilitarian objects found in the home, such as erasers, earplugs, rubber bands, watches, and money. Relvas spends hours in the studio cutting, sanding, and suturing her figures, transforming the most basic of household materials into dynamic forms in motion. “I like the idea of exerting massive amounts of energy into something so ordinary and disposable.” In her exhaustive work to plot her figures into existence, Relvas overlays the realm of the everyday with tactility, sensation, and theater, making it into a dream-like, carnivalesque space.

Relvas created the plywood structures on pedestals, the scale and content of which evoke dollhouses, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a reflection of this period when “the “whole city was full of frisson.” Navigating New York City was a tentative, often terrifying experience that also contained within it feelings of rapture and release: “it was like my body suddenly acquired a whole new signaling system — a porous forcefield constantly jangling with those of other bodies, other surfaces.” In one sculpture, the central human form teeters precariously in medias res, balancing atop outstretched lengths of wood that appear like snakes or matches, pencil erasers affixed to their tops. The wooden outline of a track, fastened throughout with slats made of bits of dollar bills quilted together, ribbons its way up and around the tower into a crash of cash and bones at its peak. In another, the small human figure is again at the center of a lantern-like edifice, this time crouched in a pose of protective surrender, as tangles of fingers threaten to enclose upon it, rings of money underlining the scene. Relvas’s choice to use dollar bills in her work was prompted by receiving pandemic-related unemployment benefits: “a little raft of money to bob along on in this weird new landscape  — regular income I’d never gotten as an artist. The more I worked with money, which is this particular blend of cotton and linen, touching it, sewing it, the more fictional it became. But

simultaneously, I could never dismiss the real value of money — by trying to make work about its power, I was doing something halfway between self-indulgence and self-sabotage. So it was a relief to figure out that, in the formal sense, the money worked in the sculptures the same way it worked in my life: a little goes a long way.”

If the free-floating sculptures act as small theaters, the human scale of the wall works, which Relvas refers to en masse as “The Peanut Gallery,” playfully brings the viewer into a theater-in-the-round. Each life-size structure is pegged to the wall with two long limbs of wood, which grow up and out into floating cubist faces, their puppet mouths in mid-chatter. Relvas brings life to humble objects: hanging rounds of red and green rubber bands suggest cartoonish eyes, while erasers hanging from a uterine V at the sculptures’ chest suggest the heart or other organs. With Frisson City, Relvas has created a dreamspace of the everyday shot through with drama and frisson, which the artist defines as a “shiver up your spine.” “The reason why I love sculpture is because I love making something real to be in the world with me. It’s not like looking into a window of a world. It’s in the world, with you.”

Lee Relvas (b. 1981, Boston) is an artist, writer, and musician in New York. A recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency, she has had solo shows at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York City and Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles. She has also exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Hammer Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Art in General, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, among other galleries and institutions. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Art in America, The Comics Journal, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Her fiction has been published in BOMB Magazine and Joyland Magazine, and she has contributed articles to ArtForum and Cultured Magazine. As a singer and composer, Relvas has released six solo albums of music, and currently records under the moniker Rind. 

– Written by Svetlana Kitto

Little Rig, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, earplugs, rubber bands, piece of t-shirt, mitten clamp, eraser, polyurethane
67 × 8 × 11 in. 

Fluffer, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, thumbtacks, mesh produce bag, rubber bands, eraser, polyurethane
69 × 10 × 16 in. 

House of Mirth, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, money, rubber bands, thread, cotton interfacing, polyurethane
30 × 22 × 30 in.

Good Fortune, 2020
Plywood, epoxy putty, money, erasers, rubber bands, thread, polyurethane
25 × 20 × 20 in. 

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Installation view of Lee Relvas Frisson City

My Life in Art, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, rubber bands, metal hook, eraser, polyurethane
66 × 13 × 12 in.

God's Opinion, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, earplugs, rubber bands, stopped clocks, eraser, polyurethane
71 × 13 × 13 in. 

A Leg Up, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, money, erasers, rubber bands, thread, cotton interfacing, polyurethane
30 × 15 × 15 in.

Tizzy, 2022
Plywood, epoxy putty, rubber bands, thumbtacks, tailor's chalk, lighters, pennies, eraser, polyurethane
64 × 10 ×12  in.

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Selected Works

Dream SpeakRachel Eulena Williams

ZzyzxChristina Sucgang

HomesickSadie Laska

Promised LightLuke Murphy

ReadersKiyoshi Tsuchiya

ComeCloseJoan Snyder

NocturnesAnke Weyer

Arms and the SeaKatherine Bradford

Objet OuttaKen Resseger

Last LandscapesGerald Ferguson

Leroy's LuncheonAzikiwe Mohammed

Frisson CityLee Relvas

Reassembler 3Brian Belott

A Ball is for ThrowingElizabeth McIntosh

Ambient MusicLee Mary Manning

TORSOAnnabeth Marks

BiscuitLyric Shen

Body ForthMatt Connors

A Cliff to ClimbRyan Preciado

Library of a DreamRobert Janitz

Gold GoldRJ Messineo

On ValentinesSpencer Lewis

Who is afraid of Natasha?Joanna Malinowska & CT Jasper

USMichael Mahalchick

TRANSFIGURATIONAurora Pellizzi

The Thick StreamGroup Exhibition

5 SeasonsJason Fox

Mother PaintingsKatherine Bradford

Ceramics and PrintsElisabeth Kley

Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm curated by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle

#VayaConDiosKatherine Bernhardt

DrawingsJason Fox

Heart, HeartAnke Weyer

Tracing MemoryRachel Eulena Williams

Rayos De SombraRobert Janitz

GorpTyson Reeder

EREHWONSadie Laska