Governor General Award Recipients: Micah Lexier / Reva Stone

Posted by Border Crossings on April 23, 2015

Recent Governor General Award winners Micah Lexier and Reva Stone were selected with six other artists to receive the Visual and Media Arts award for 2015.

In their feature videos for the Canada Council for the Arts, the artists speak on their processes: For Lexier, on working intuitively to combine simply, a love of text and forms; For Stone, an acceptance of the challenges of exploration through an envelopment of new technologies, and this, in order to connect prototypes with the viewer through the mediating of ideas.

Interviewed by Border Crossings in Issue 101, Reva Stone is introduced:

“These are the things I saw: thick twists of matter that look like flesh trees; muted party favours from the New Year’s Eve celebration of a giant; building-sized clusters of capillaries, or roots, or bean sprouts; huge, soft-skinned parsnips with veins glowing menacingly below the surface; limitless pieces of octopus curling away into a space so deep you imagine yourself in another universe; phallic shapes that make you realize size doesn’t just matter, it is matter; massive white pathways that shoot across the surface like the calcified traces of meteors; mobiles of the biological forms made by the artist/zoologist, Ernest Haeckel; huge lozenges that cross-hatch and skein and weave themselves into shamanic forms, and then dissolve into something else, as does everything you’ve set your eyes on. Imaginal Expression is a world of limitless measure; it is architectural and intimate, eerie and sexy. There is something about its scale and ineluctable mutation that puts you in mind of Walt Whitman’s “procreative urge,” the world of inner space turning itself inside out in a slow, seductive turn, as if a tectonic shift were a slow-motion striptease. Put another way, it is the body of the universe techno-eroticizing itself. Put another way, it is a recasting of Descartes’s definition of being, which now becomes, “I am, therefore I morph.” Put another way…”

Micah Lexier in Border Crossings:

Art Pages in Issue 112

Borderview in Issue 112

Borderview in Issue 123

Crossover in issue 129

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