The Skirt:
Walls Wearing Worlds
A site-specific exhibition by Leeza Meksin
Curated by Eric Hibit
January 18 - March 16, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18, 6-8pm
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Walls Wearing Worlds, a site-specific exhibition in The Skirt by OyG Co-Director and Co-Founder, the artist Leeza Meksin. The opening reception is on Saturday, January 18th, 6-8pm. The exhibition continues until March 16th, 2025.
Walls Wearing Worlds is a unique moment at OyG Projects because typically the organization does not feature solo exhibitions by its Co-Directors. For almost a dozen years, OyG Projects has provided artists in the wider creative community with a platform to experiment and test the possibilities of their medium. Meksin’s passion for site-specific work was at the root of creating The Skirts’ programming in addition to the main space gallery shows. Given her decade-long commitment to other artist’s site-specific exhibitions in the space, it feels appropriate to highlight Meksin’s own artistic practice at this time.
Leeza Meksin’s work is characterized by an interest in the body: its shapes, sizes, and how it does (or does not) conform to the things it wears and the spaces it inhabits. In lieu of conventional figuration, Meksin alludes to the body by stretching yards of spandex mesh over the walls of The Skirt, in some cases, from floor to ceiling. This transformation of architecture into bodily evocations sets the stage for her painting (on canvas, wood panel, and neoprene), to appear on top of, behind, and in-between the transparent fabric. Meksin’s paintings offer further plot-twists of materiality and innovation, combining paper pulp, fabric, paint, found objects, sundry trimmings, and other (sometimes curious) incidentals. Like magnets for the flotsam of the world, Meksin’s paintings suck up the material richness of the consumerist landscape, re-rooting these potentially forgotten items into a new aesthetic and personal relevance.
Meksin’s interest in painterly and architectural conventions - and a simultaneous desire to push past those conventions - are two pillars of her artistic sensibility. The tension between these two pillars permeates both her art practice (as in Walls Wearing Worlds) and her curatorial practice, as well. Painting Deconstructed (May 18 - August 24, 2024) was Meksin’s last curated exhibition, featuring artists who likewise stretch, reinvent and surpass painting's material possibilities. A full-color catalog for Painting Deconstructed published by Space Sister’s Press is available HERE. Space Sister’s Press will also be publishing a color catalog for Walls Wearing Worlds, which will be launched at the closing of the exhibition on March 16, 2025.
This exhibition is curated by OyG Projects Co-Director Eric Hibit. For more information contact oygprojects@gmail.com
BIO
Leeza Meksin (born Moscow, Russia) is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, public art and multiples. Her work investigates parallels between conventions of painting, architecture and our bodies. Meksin has created site-specific installations for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, CLEA RSKY, NYC, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Academy of Design, NYC, The Uptown Triennial at The Lenfest Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, NYC, BRIC Media Arts, Regina Rex and Brandeis University. In 2015 Meksin received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2021 she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. In 2019 Meksin was the artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Her work has been featured in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice. In 2022, Turret Tops and Before, a book featuring 15 years of her artistic practice, was published by Space Sisters Press. In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery that she continues to co-direct. Meksin’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Two Coats of Paint. Her most recent curatorial project, Painting Deconstructed received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and was listed by Hyperallergic in Best of 2024 Exhibitions in NYC. In 2021 Meksin joined the faculty at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) where she is currently the Director of the MFA program in Creative Visual Arts.
