Lesley – Anne Cao
Hard and soft prayers
Hard and soft prayers. A series of exercises in marking surfaces, in making intentions. A catalog of framed gestures. A constant calculation that exists in the process with the deliberate choice of material, media, and technique, with a proclivity towards the insolence of charcoal to the steady restraint and nervous slips of the hand. This is an archive that traces the artist’s own thread of interests: stories of lost drawings, musical phrases singing about breath, some boys, accumulated title drafts, a puzzle of pencils, and a vision of a dog (a gift). A physical, rudimentary, and repeated act rendered line after line until the tangible image comes to its fore, whose focus is a type of disobedient play rather than precision or producing a perfect copy. This, at its core, is a matter of attention and intention: what becomes the weight of drawing, of a line or of a shade?
(IAF/LAC)
Lesley-Anne Cao is a visual artist based in Quezon City, Philippines.
Her practice is a series of divergent processes that explore the interplay of materiality, exhibition making, and fiction.
Her work makes use of recognizable materials — books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money — towards the actualization and presentation of fictional objects and environments.
