Amie LeGette

Exhibited at Richard Levy Gallery in 2023, Shifting Pitch is a series of assemblages created using painted translucent silk and watercolor on paper. The work refers to the feeling of movement, sound, and the transient quality found in nature.

“Amie LeGette (b.1985) creates ethereal artworks by layering painted silks and watercolors on paper. The translucent layers play with depth and perception. LeGette draws inspiration from the gradients of dawn and dusk, bodily forms, psychedelic tracers, meditation, and other sources. Her abstract landscapes reflect the transience and impermanence found in the natural world.

To create her works, LeGette begins with photographic collages and layered digital drawings, which are translated onto silk. Each artwork comprises 6-12 pieces of dyed silk with the same composition overlapped and layered in different directions. Watercolors are sometimes applied behind the silk layers to ground the composition.”

—Richard Levy Gallery, show catalog excerpt, 2023

Exhibited at Masley Gallery in April of 2021.

‘Cusps’ as it relates to transition, coming into being, archi- tectural points where curves meet and change direction, as well as celestial and bodily connotations, all of which are mirrored in the work.

cusp noun

\ ˈkəsp \

Definition of cusp:

POINT, APEX: such as

a : a point of transition

b: either horn of a crescent moon

c: a fixed point on a mathematical curve at which a point tracing the curve would exactly reverse its direction of motion

d: an ornamental pointed projection formed by or arising from the inter- section of two arcs or foils

e (1): a point on the grinding surface of a tooth

(2): a fold or flap of a cardiac valve

“cusp,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cusp. Accessed 4/1/2021

On Amie LeGette’s Work, March 2021 By John Niekrasz

Like the chemical reaction within the brain when it is posed a question.

The pull toward resolution and, not finding one easily, the sweet suspension there.

Sacred geometries gone loose.

Organic structure arising through silks and paper. Figuration transmuting back to granular mystery. Ideas of human order in conversation with wilderness. The dance of entropy over the architected. Ozymandias.

Playing with stereo vision, looking at the desert through skewed opera glasses. Cross-eyed landscapes merging inside feathered lorgnettes.

Images reflected, refracted inside the mirror of the human mind.

Division of negative space. The ancient idea that meaning multiplies with every subdivision.

Calendars. Segmentation of time and space. Symbol and thing itself. Folding of space via material. Soft schedule of paper. Dendrochronologic materialism: fixing time, reading time in the rings of a mul- berry tree.

Hungry silkworm.

Evidence.

Bontecou-ian void-seeking but free of vanishing points.

Sculptural depth that messes with the aperture, the viewer’s sense of place. Foreground, middle distance, and background each ruling sovereignly over their respective domains. But then they start sweating and bleed into each other. Sense of the infinite in these layers, these layerings.

Gradations that lead the eye through space. Up or down. Across. Gradations like music, slowly shifting pitches.

Burnt violet, iron, indigo, peach sunset, sand and bleached bone, winter’s cerule- an sky, prickly pear, blood, yellowed hides, dawn, deluge green.

Notches and cutouts implying figurehood.

Cardiac and mammary anatomies. Humanoid. Pre-human. Ova. Wombs. Beds.

Pleasure in the materials.

Claiming structure.

Hard armatures for the most diaphanous substances, light and air.

Silk and pigment. Questions of materiality and immateriality.

The frame informs the image, is inseparable from it, makes meaningful incur- sions into the field of play. Lends rich and complex contrasts to our sense of the pieces’ solidity.

Reminds me of Elaine Scarry’s writing on how artists achieve “solidity” in the viewer’s imagination by exploiting how easily we can visualize filmy objects,

gauzy fabric and folds:

The passing of a filmy surface over another (by comparison, dense) surface is

not the only way of solidifying walls. But it is a key way; it recurs with writers universally saluted for their vividness, and it occurs precisely at moments where the newborn fictional worlds are most fragile and at risk because they are just in the midst of coming into being.

There are soft washes and hard edges in this imagery as well as in the materials. Is transparency the ultimate giving-way? The most open softness? Seeing through to the solid structures beneath. And, alternately, seeing through hard- ness to the softness beneath.

Translucency as metaphor for the wish of the self. See me. See through me to me.

Reality and fixedness hand-in-hand with the open uncertainty of the imagined. Longing, too, in the separation of layers, things not coming together, ever chang- ing depth of field within a piece. At angles.

They lean against the wall like us. Informal. Casual. Temporary. This is all just happenstance. Elaborate chance.

A dislocating and reassembling in all dimensions.

— John Niekrasz

John Niekrasz is a writer, composer, and musician from Chicago, Illinois and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2004. He has been a resident of Paris’ Cité internationale des arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the ACRE residency. He publishes and performs widely. His website is JohnNiekrasz.com

Five additions printed at and in collaboration with the Tamarind Institute.

Exhibited at Ellsworth Galley in Santa Fe, New Mexico- Nascent is a two person exhibition of sculptures by Courtney M. Leonard and paintings by Amie LeGette

“Both artists are women consciously placing themselves in relation to the landscape and to tradition. For LeGette it is interiority and the feminine body in relation to the landscape and to the overarching masculinity of abstract painting and abstract expressionism in particular; for Leonard it is environmental degradation in relation to the Shinnecock Nation’s tribal lands on Long Island and the material forms used in their traditional fishing practices.

Each artist’s work references a state of becoming, of transition: one that is not always comfortable, and often painful. LeGette had the intention of making this most recent body of work more immediately related to the bodily. She refers to birthing or a birthing quality in relation to this work, her paintings containing winding, pinkish forms, and an inky, black iris the color of congealed blood, suggestive of viscera. There is a paradoxical tension held between the intimacy of the internal and the evocation of touch when paired with the seamless surface of the canvas. Leonard’s on-going series employs the forms of traditional Shinnecock baskets utilized for fishing to evoke the atmosphere and violent transitions of environmental degradation brought on by the long history of exploitation of indigenous lands. This state of transition, of nascency, is held within the delicate webs: the beauty and fragility of survivance in the face of oppression.”

-Nathan Usher Rubinfeld, show text for Nascent Atmospheres, 2018

Exhibited at Ellsworth Galley in Santa Fe, New Mexico- Accumbent is a series of works-on-paper completed in 2018

As seeds to the larger works, accumbent refers to the way in which an embryonic leaf will wrap around the edge of a seed before folding in on itself. Often an initial step in my painting process, watercolor and gouache allow quick exploration while working on larger oil paintings. These pieces examine atmosphere, internal and external, that however cropped feel expansive. Using a palette of subdued oxidation, I’m implying reference to the body. Being more specific, female physiology and embryonic spaces that center on concepts of nurture and growth. The addition of opaque linear forms suggest a wrapping action that is evocative of touch, and in some out-cuttings a pressing of negative space. This wrapping action and beginning stage titles the show.

Table designed and built by Raphael Kruger

Exhibited at the Littman Galley in Portland, Oregon- Slow Grow is a series of paintings created in 2016- 2017

 "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."
— Don Delillo, White Noise

After a lifetime in cities and towns, a faint longing rises. A desire for the geometry of skylines to be overgrown, and for architecture to open and lighten space, rather than confine and darken it. However, this isn’t a wish for civilizations to fall to ruin. It’s the dream of a surreal atmosphere where the architected and the wild meet.

Corbett and LeGette work in this haze between the two. Structures and color become tiny phenomenological experiences that confuse the lyrical fluidity of nature with the rigidity of the man-made. These moments contain beauty, delight and vastness in a way that feels ancient and life-affirming. As if they are hoping to imbue our new, technological world with the very delicate qualities that make us human.

- Calvin Ross Carl & Ashley Sloan, show text from a 2016 exhibition with David Corbett

A Series of small works on paper completed in 2014 and 2015