SOMA Living August 2021

ARTIST OF THE MONTH

The most important thing to know about jc lenochan’s work is this: he sees his work as a set of questions, rather than answers, as ideas rather than objects. He says that, while he doesn’t believe labels, he considers himself more a “visual thinker of conceptual ideas.” I had read jc lenochan’s (he requests that his name be written in all lower case, because he says it is a question of language and the western interpretation of its rules) artist statement before

meeting him, so I was prepared for a conversation on art that would be unlike many others. He calls his work an investigation into epistemology that seeks to interrogate the origins of our knowledge and particularly our assumptions about race and class. In a conversation on his work, he cites a wide range of influences, including Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Joseph Beuys’s theory of social sculptures, and numerous writers and books as being seminal to his practice, with Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Decolonizing the Mind” being central. He uses books, furniture and discarded objects, along with paper and canvas for drawing surfaces. If you ask him what his medium is, he says “everything but painting.” His focus over the past few years is the creation of “social sculptures” where the objective is engaging the public in an active dialogue. “There are no rules to this thing called art,” lenochan says. But he also acknowledges that art “saved me from myself” as a younger man. His ideas feel radical in our culture of commerce, and he talks about revolution and

deconstruction, but he himself is patient and earnest. He has taught at the high school and university levels for years and continues to, and speaks with reverence about his students and how important their ideas are. Many years ago, he decided to seamlessly align his studio and pedagogical practices so that he was creating work that reflected concerns of race, class, and critical pedagogy, just as he was addressing those same issues in the classroom. Ultimately, he is seeking the answer to an extraordinarily complex question: “What role has education played in creating our current social condition in terms of justice, poverty, incarceration, race, and class construct?”

Elizabeth Harrison Kubany is founder of KUBANY, LLC, a communications firm established on her lifelong belief in the power of architecture, design, and art to make the world a better, more beautiful, and more equitable place. She is also the co- founder, with her husband, of Winterhouse Projects, an online gallery platform that promotes the work of emerging artists. @ElizabethKubany

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