My name is Lex Laneuville, I am from Upstate New York, more specifically Brasher Falls. The topics I delve into with my work are ever changing however, the body of work I am building now feels most important. My work is very intertwined with environmentalism and raising awareness for the protection of our planet.
Growing up I felt as if the flourished trees and tall blades of grass were my protection. Exploring the outdoors and navigating my relationship with my environment, led me to feel as if I’m in collaboration with nature when it allows me to be. Moving my mode of working from a rural to urban landscape, my art became a form of activism. Assessing the fate of our planet through my own personal experiences, I have embodied that within this work. I am raising awareness for the protection and preservation of our planet.
This body of work relies heavily on the influence of a logging company and many other factors destroying my personal environment. Witnessing these disastrous actions awoke a dedication to exploring my relationship to nature further. Evaluating the research I did back at home, I have created images I feel that best reflect what I have learned being in an urban landscape.
Continuing this body of work, I have grown alongside it as I have further navigated my devotion to these topics. These sets of images are made using silkscreen and other media. Through creating hand drawn imagery onto film, these became my fixed matrix. After printing the fixed matrix, I hand embellished some textures and added color through watercolor and colored pencils.
By experimenting with charcoal and graphite I was able to intertwine draftsmanship with personal narrative within individual prints. The narratives that I have created, I had drawn from personal observations from living in urbanization. In my observations of the urban jungle, there is more debris and waste produced by people, I am surrounded by concrete almost everywhere I go, and I can feel the burning in my body when I breathe the air around me.
Through collage, I was able to create movement and depth within each print. I sourced found images and text dated years back from newspaper articles. Reading these articles while working, answered some of the questions I had about the state of our environment during previous years. These problems were manufactured before I was conceived and continued to develop when I was too young to understand. Issues such as rising global temperatures, oil industries, factory production, and logging companies have all contributed to the pollution that has contaminated our air and waterways.
When I was in my natural environment I was able to experience what was happening around me, allowing me to respond to nature, forcing me to become sustainable with what is around me. After moving to an urban area, my work has become more of a product of consistent reactions, working on multiple works at the same time. I was inspired by John Cage and his use of reaction and participation with making the work, but also the Dadaist movement and the way artists created work recontextualizing what was happening around them.

In understanding the foundation of my art practice, what excites me the most about art
making is the endless experimental possibilities particular to drawing and printmaking. One of
the most influential exercise proposals I was prompted with during my four years in college is
the hypothetical question - what constitutes a drawing? what is not allowed to be a drawing?
Clearly, the answer is: everything can be, and barely anything is not. Expanding my view of
mark making as a tool toward experimentation allowed for greater conceptual freedom. Through
the development of my studio practice and my greater body of work, questioning the confines of
what “is” and “isn’t” the preconceived conception of a tool or practice I participate in relieved my
work of an unrequited perfectionism and drew me in to questioning, requestioning, and
contradicting. Where can these questions take you? Particular to my body of work in the BFA
Printmaking and Sculpture thesis show, I rode my love for examination through my process in
printmaking and drawing as well as entertaining the layers in my conceptual framework.
In seeking to approach art making as orbiting the concept of creating manifestations of
an output by passing concepts through a series of filtering systems, be it a translation of regular,
common conception or a niche subject, my work uses the format of printmaking, drawing, and
collage as a participatory measure of a decomposition of thought. To consider filtration as a
reflective practice, my works seek to distill and comprehend the transactionary measure of the
considered subject. In formatting my work in this way, I seek to recontextualize language and
image from a tool of communication, to rather a tactile, shapeable device for understanding the
generation of voluntary, or involuntary, human relation. Decomposition has manifested in a
surveilled nature on the use of veiled journal-esque language and an interruption in
diagrammatic imagery.
All printed images are sourced and/or inspired by diagrams in articles outlining artificial
intelligence programs. The articles used are intended to be active programs implemented as a
substitution of common detectable comprehension. The attachment and detachment of the
images mechanical precision is an intended collaborative effort. All images used are hand
printed using polyester plate lithographs.The ensued transformations occur through processing
the intended purpose, through my decisions, through my laser printer, through the strength of
laser toner on the polyester plate, through my hand, and through my treatment of the image, as
well as any additions to the final product, are all integral collaborations. By viewing my work in
this way, I am seeking to implement a filtration process that is the antithesis of the published
engines. I do not feel as if the precision of the sourced images should be disputed, but rather
used as an active tool in the exploration of this process-based decomposition.
To approach my work as a collaborative effort alleviates discrepancies between the
matrix and the final image. The challenge my work poses is to spotlight the subdued,
manufactured, mechanised, and authoritative decay of thought through various processing
systems. In implementing a personalized formatting to simulate this, I have produced a series of
proof of decomposing translations.

Presented as a tiny body that holds so much trauma, birds serve as a vehicle for human stories. We offer them a space, but they live not with us-
but rather at a parallel distance as living specimens clamoring to look for any sign of life in an inhospitable space.
To see the light of life leave the eyes of a dying creature is to see briefly
into a region that is unknown and unknowable. This awareness of life in death is humbling. In this wisdom, every creature, however tiny, is life-worthy
and every harm accountable.
This is a moment of fragility, vulnerability and meditation, as Rathi calls upon the viewer to humbly witness all the wounded spaces.

The Abyss

The chasm between inner and outer, hidden and shown. Visceral moments are like echos in the distance, or watching a needle puncture skin that has already been treated with numbing cream. Disembodiment from physical form and the external. But an uncertainty about where sentient consciousness actually exists when it cannot ground itself in tangible moments. A sort of purgatory. A mist desperate to leave the atmosphere but bound to a body and an unreal reality.



The Veil

The place beyond what we can perceive - sometimes we can feel it when it's blown away by whatever is underneath. Kissing our skin. There are fragments in brief moments when whatever lies beyond is so vast that it strains the fabric. Allowing us to see outlines underneath. We cannot penetrate the veil. However, there are places where it is thinner.



Glitch

The moment we observe the unmasking of something that we may have subconsciously known to be artifice before, but had tacitly consented to pretending was not. For as long as we have recorded history we have been inundated and indoctrinated into subjective realities presented as objective truths-what we value, what we perceive as good and bad, even time itself. Time is not a line, it is a spiral moving outwards. This is hidden from us. We are instead given fragmented understanding through a biased lens, presented with a narrative rife with falsehoods of past, present, and future. Observing the glitch is an encouragement to question why these unspoken contracts were created in the first place and who they truly serve.