Mind Leaves Body
Elisabeth Condon, Susan Luss, Alyse Rosner
Westbeth Gallery
April 3rd - April 21st, 2024 

The extent to which our minds and our bodies might operate with relative independence of one another, especially when we’re in the throes of activities engaging both, is surely a matter of debate. And yet, the sensation of the mind not being in full physical control of the creative mode is one to which many visual artists can relate. Are such states of creative flow perceived as the mind leaving the body, or as the body letting the mind go? Either way, many artists would agree that the mindless body is often the more fluidly productive one in the studio.

For the three artists in Mind Leaves Body, catalyzing a state of creative flow is instantiated by variables in materials, process, and thematic focus. Primary among these matters is a rather simple one: scale. Condon, Luss, and Rosner find that working on large surfaces is not only an immersive process, but also a transportive one reflective of the vastness of the urban and natural spaces that inspire them. Scale carries over into the viewing experience as well: the artists’ large formats of unstretched canvas or paper are too expansive to take in all at once, introducing time as an active element in engaging with the work. Adapting modernist traditions such as abstraction and jazz to a time of algorithms and information ubiquity, the artists use improvisational working methods to channel their direct experience. Whether pouring, dying, staining, layering, or inscribing, the artists reimagine and reanimate landscape, infusing it with ecstatic dynamism while losing themselves in the process.

Elisabeth Condon filters Manhattan’s flora and fauna through decorative wallpapers evoking the types of interiors familiar to her since childhood. Her abrupt transitions between poured areas, patterns, and invented and stylized forms compress space, while also bringing unlike elements into coherence in ways that landscapes do as well. Susan Luss synthesizes architecture and painting by imprinting the buzz of the city on large canvases she wraps, drapes, or spontaneously performs with, fusing art and life. Her works are recontextualized for site-specific locations, whether urban landscapes, her Brooklyn studio, or exhibition spaces. Alyse Rosner sets her layering process into motion starting with rubbings from beloved trees and enormous leaves near her home in Connecticut. The makeshift prints furnish a base layer for her expansive surfaces, which she then stains with color and inscribes with undulating lines until explosive forms materialize, bringing real and imagined spaces into convergence.

Condon, Luss, and Rosner know that creative flow isn’t something that can be fabricated, forced, or even sufficiently described. But it is certainly something that can be felt and cultivated in the studio. For them, immersive scale provides a state of flow, channeling synesthetic impulses for the mind to process while the body does its thing. 

– Mind Leaves Body will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D.