A Drawing and A Sculpture
Micah Lexier
October 18 – November 15, 2025

Collaborative Drawing event, Saturday, November 8, 2025, 12-6 PM In lieu of an opening reception.

“Think of bubbles. They’re the part of champagne that tickles your nose, the part of a bath that tickles your skin, a part of childhood play that tickles your imagination. Fragile and contingent, bubbles are a textbook demonstration of ephemerality, and there’s always a little thrill when they pop and disappear.

Wall Drawing (Fig. 79) suspends that thrill for a more robust pleasure. Working from a small illustration of water evaporation, with his frequent collaborator Lisa Naftolin, Lexier has rationalized and concretized a tiny drawing of minuscule water droplets forming and dissipating, formalizing and enlarging it into a series of graduated dots and lines, rendered in baked black porcelain enamel and screwed to the wall, occupying the entire forty foot long surface of the east wall of MKG127. The effect is to transform a dynamic molecular event into something stable, durable and elegant, monumental.

Now think about things – things as opposed to stuff. Things have names, histories and functions. Things exist. This is one of Lexier’s mantras and it serves well to think about it in the context of Self-Portrait as a Found Drawing (Five Rectangles). In this case the found drawing depicts a male figure manipulating a group of five variously sized rectangles in a somewhat haphazard arrangement on a wall. Micah received this drawing as a gift. No, not in colourful wrappings for his birthday. Rather, as a gift of recognition and as an instruction for how to make a sculpture. Executing the instruction by making a sculpture as depicted in the drawing, maintaining its relation to shape, scale and position, the drawing becomes a self-portrait of himself in the future and then the sculpture is an act of becoming.

A Drawing and A Sculpture. Each of these works occupy both phases as they go through the artist’s iterative processes. We’ve seen Fig. 79 before, but in a different form, as a cut paper multiple. We’ve seen self-portraits in many forms and materials. We will see them again. Though they will vary in form, scale, number or other definitive characteristics, their existence is certain.” – Christina Ritchie

Micah Lexier wishes to acknowledge and thank Lisa Nafton for her significant contributions to the creation of the artworks in this exhibition.