Recent Work: Aida Laleian and Steve Levin

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Dates
2/26/11 - 4/24/11
Artists

Aida Laleian and Steve Levin

Curator

Lucie Steinberg, Class of 2012, Williams Graduate Student in the History of Art

This exhibition brings together recent work by Williams College art professors Aida Laleian (b. Bucharest, Romania, 1955) and Steve Levin.

Combining photography, collage, hand-coloring, and digital printing, Aida Laleian has long challenged viewers’ expectations of traditional media. In these large-scale, hanging banners, Laleian offers the viewers lush arrays of contorted bodies, historical costumes, and baroque backgrounds. Her meticulous pieces draw attention to the contrast between the rapidity of digital photography, and the painstaking process of embroidery.

Steve Levin’s oil paintings make explicit the eccentricity of the everyday. Exploiting familiar imagery within strange scenes, his paintings seductively invite the viewer to project her own memories and associations. Depicting dense mélanges of ephemera, Levin creates microcosms in which objects ranging from paper dolls to rarefied art mix and mingle.

Installation photo by Arthur Evans.
Installation photo by Arthur Evans.
Installation photo by Arthur Evans.
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About the artists

Aida Laleian has exhibited her work at the DeCordova Museum, Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, the Houston Center for Photography in Texas, the Photographic Resource Center in Boston and the Light Factory in North Carolina. Reviews of her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Laleian received her B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978 and her M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis in 1980. She was born in Bucharest, Romania.

Steve Levin’s paintings have been shown at Charles More Gallery and Rodger LaPelle Gallery in Philadelphia, as well as the van Straaten and Lyons-Weir Galleries in Chicago. His works have also been displayed at the Roswell Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. He received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1980 and a B.A. from Reed College in 1976.