Annette Lemieux: Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business presents a combination of new work with work revisited to reveal the relationship between object, mediated memory, personal experience and cultural history that informs all of Lemieux’s practice. This exhibition as a whole is the perfect epilogue to the traveling exhibition The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux, the first critical overview of her work from the past twenty-five years recently on view at Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts and currently at Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI.

Unfinished Business continues to trace her investigations of memory and meaning. However, here we are presented with an unfiltered personal and poetic connection to the vivid lives of objects. Collectively the works function as if a road map to her creative process, a process that incorporates intellectual analyses of social codes with an emphasis on psychological and emotional content and direct engagement with material.

Though Lemieux’s primary commitment is to the content in her work, her juxtaposition of material and media consistently reveals the potency of the object. In works such as Things to walk away with, 2011, Lemieux re-contextualizes simple everyday objects to construct a narrative both personal and universal. In the expanded field they are signposts, simultaneously relics of the past, notations of the present, an index of culture and suggest a potential future. Returning to the central theme of her work Lemieux confronts time, questions what it means to be in the present, and analyzes the layered and transformative capacity of memory—private and public.

Annette Lemieux

Annette Lemieux studied at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford where she received her BFA in 1980. Her numerous solo exhibitions include the Matrix Gallery, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; Castello Di Rivoli, Museo d’Arts Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gill, Mexico City; and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College. Her works are found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Berlin Embassy Collection, Berlin; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Spain; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley; Harvard Art Museum/Fogg, Cambridge; Foto Museum, Winterthur, Switzerland; Israel Museum; Krannert Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Princeton University Art Museum; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Wadsworth Atheneum; Walker Art Center; Washington University Art Gallery; and Yale University Art Gallery. Lemieux has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany. In 2009 Lemieux received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art. Her traveling mid-career retrospective opened in October 2010 at the Krannert Art Museum, is on view at the Worcester Art Museum through October 9, 2011, and will travel to the Kalamazoo Institute of Art. Lemieux is represented by Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston and the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen.

Lelia Amalfitano

Lelia Amalfitano is a curator and writer. From 1986 to 1999, she was director of exhibitions and public programs at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she curated numerous exhibitions, including Self/Made Self/Conscious: Janine Antoni and Bruce Nauman; Changing Context: Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari; Undercurrents: Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Morris; and Social Fictions: Lari Pittman and Andrea Zittel. Additionally, as an independent curator she organized Jane and Louise Wilson for the MIT List Visual Arts Center and, as curator, Impostures: Clay Ketter and George Stoll and Candida Hofer: The Psychology of Space at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Her exhibitionsexplore the reciprocal relationship between current artistic practice and transitional cultural constructs. She has been a visiting lecturer in contemporary art at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, and is currently a visiting scholar in the Fine Arts Department at Boston College.