Deconstruction Site: On the Job with Annette Lemieux

For Annette Lemieux's audience, the wall reappears, in pieces. "Crossing the Rubicon," her newest piece, was featured last month at the Mario Diacono gallery in Boston. In Diacono's presentation, the two canvas panels (with pencil, gesso, pumice and acrylic on the left-hand panel and water-based ink and acrylic on the right) attract the viewer out of a cube of white, bare walls. Similarly, Lemieux's piece lifts her bricks out of a blank space, penciled, then layered with textural media, delivering geometric packages of a single, double or triple artistry.

The way Lemieux builds her picture out of such diverse materials is characteristic of her strategy at large. Since studying at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in the late '70s, Lemieux's career has involved found objects. Her use of bricks is just the latest in a stretch of utensils like nails, helmets, newspapers and book jackets. Mixed media provides Lemieux's work with a material dynamic, directing the viewer's imagination to a remembered world of objects. Lemieux's juxtapositions of these objects offer more. Effects of this doubled consciousness produce an art that draws on memory. The Matter of History, 1994, exhibited pieces based on Holocaust and World War I imagery. The Appearance of Sound, 1989, presented works combining text and space, or erasures, with images, resulting in a creative display of new meanings.

Enter the right panel of her new piece. A woman, capped in red kerchief, lifts a pallet of bricks off the ground. Her expression and features delineate strength. The image is the silk-screened representation of a photograph taken of a Soviet drawing. The drawing itself hints of propaganda art. Meanwhile, it represents the work done with bricks, Lemieux's own. The figure's bold gaze redirects the eye, in case it has strayed, back down into the center of the diptych. Striking a balance between left and right is the work done by colors; both the figure and the brick units at left wear the same hues of olive, ochre, green and red.

At left, the unfinished wall is more than a foot shorter than the dominating image of the body at work. It seems to weigh less than the image of the woman stilled in her movement towards it. If the woman holds the key to the work, we may require more of her identity: does she represent a kind of social autobiography of the artist? The motion of the actor is already described: "Crossing the Rubicon" refers to Caesar's crossing of the small stream in Italy, beginning the war with Pompey. His words, "alea jacta est" or "the die is cast," have come to describe a point of no return. Lemieux's title describes the motion of a decisive step, at the beginning of some undertaking-perhaps playing on the Rubicon die as a unit of brick-like rectangles. Whatever she has in store, at least here she crosses the liminal spaces between separate media, between art and artist, between spectator and object.

The Harvard Crimson: How did you begin work on "Crossing the Rubicon"?

Annette Lemieux: The idea for the painting came after a number of paintings I did in 1995 that dealt with brick walls. I didn't make it right away; I finished it in 2000. I've spent five years of work battling with presenting these images. I see it as the marriage of two motifs: meaning and brick walls.

THC: In your newest piece, you've included the image of a woman at work, taken from a Russian pamphlet. Is this a portrait?

Lemieux: In 1991, I did a portrait piece at Mario Diacono, a kind of Boston portrait and one of the first portraits. It was my face superimposed on a kind of cardboard image. It resembled one of those props at Fenway, where you stick your head through a hole and take a picture. On the left panel of this piece, the woman is pushing a pallet of bricks. In my work in 1993, I was working with actual, physical cobblestones. For the past six or seven years of my activity, I've used found images, images that were not mine. At times these pieces tend to be political, yet not supporting one party or another.

THC: Would you describe your work with different media?

Lemieux: My work is conceptually oriented, influenced by conceptual art of the '70s and also minimalism. I usually have an idea, then work from that. The piece's form could become a photograph, painting or sculpture. That's why it tends to be different: forms come out of how I handle the media.

THC: Have you encountered any disadvantages in mixing media?

Lemieux: The disadvantage in working now with mixed media would have to be how receptive people are in this country. Europe has a strong history of conceptual art. Here, people often want you to be one thing and not ten other things. Acceptance is an issue, meaning how the critic or viewer affects the critical reception. It's also difficult on pragmatic levels: in my studio, working with the materials, I have to start from level zero.

Lemieux, visiting artist and lecturer in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, teaches a course on silk-screening.