David Lefkowitz and Stephen Mohring
7 January — 6 February 2005
Carleton College Art Gallery
David Lefkowitz and Stephen Mohring, both art professors at Carleton College, invite viewers to ask questions. Lefkowitz teaches painting and Mohring teaches sculpture, and they coteach the Critical Issues in Contemporary Art seminar. As teachers and as artists, they are dedicated to the proposition that art is at once an end in itself and a catalyst for conversations about ideas.
Lefkowitz and Mohring both work in the shifting borderland between Modernism and Postmodernism. Each engages directly and energetically with materials even while insisting that art is primarily a philosophical enterprise.
The work in Topics for Further Discussion concerns the relation between physical form and abstract systems for conveying information. Using very different materials and techniques, both artists pose questions like:
- How rigid are the boundaries between two, three, and four dimensional phenomena?
- How do disparate elements coalesce into a whole?
- How is our perception of the world altered by the conventions we trust to describe it?