LESLIE MUTCHLER
artist's statement

My collages, digital drawings, and recycled paper and coroplast installations stem from an investigation into consumer desires to purchase an organized lifestyle. Using catalogue glossies from Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Pottery Barn, and others, I create a hybrid-form of organization that speaks about the many tastes and design influences surrounding our consumer culture. My research focuses on furniture that functions solely as storage; it contains one’s belongings as it continues to perpetuate a want of more. I am intrigued by such a device’s ability to eliminate an accumulation of belongings into one unified object and thus the accumulation’s ability to live under a minimal guise of solidarity.

I am designing hybrid storage systems- modular pieces that grow in response to collection, yet strive to minimize such expansion. This dichotomy is significant in my work: an ever-growing accumulation versus a sincere want for containment and minimization of such. Currently, my digital drawings are composed from a reused and recycled vocabulary of ready-made furniture pieces (cut and catalogued from similar contemporary sources). By utilizing digital applications I am able to stretch, contort and warp these otherwise singular pieces into copious and complex images of architecture and landscape that challenge our expectations of accumulation and minimization on a contemporary and socioeconomic scale.

That intersection- the convergence of disorder and order, accumulation and minimization, utopian ideals and realistic notions- then becomes the unstable subject of my installation works. I strive to build structures, landscapes, and objects of perfection, utilizing paper (once fresh- now recycled) as a primary source material. These utopian structures fall continuously short- at times resolving themselves as an exercise in futility- full of almosts and blurred absolutes. But much like my modernist predecessors, the work begins and ends engaged in a sincere desire to learn perfection.