Jac Leirner

Up close, one sees price tags of ever increasing value, stickers she tore off cigarette packs she smoked during Brazil's now distant period of hyper-inflation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Leirner always operates in this double bind, between an idea of formalist perfection and a wry sense of irony articulated around subtle autobiographical elements. Her work is the result of a careful and precise hoarding of banal objects over the years, a kind of archeological dig into the present that evolves into a chronicle of a period in her life and the society in which she lives. In this way, Leirner constructs an entire body of work out of what seems like the leftovers of a jet set existence.
Amassed, piled up or arrayed as plastic elements are heaps of ticket stubs, shopping bags, stickers, price tags, napkins, business cards, ashtrays, airplane cutlery and blankets. In a museum setting, they metamorphose into flags, mosaics or colorful abstract compositions that drift between minimalist sobriety and splashy neo-pop constructions.
She succeeds thus at documenting an artist's life, in this case her personal existence, by collecting ephemera, the rejected residue that accounts for the ripples a contemporary artist makes in a scene more and more dominated by capital and speculation. Leirner draws here a parallel between existing as an artist and deploying aesthetic strategies to build acclaim and money, as if being an artist itself were a performance of sorts, a juggling act between artistic integrity and mingling with the art crowd at openings and social outings.
In all, she nurtures a strong dialogue with Brazilian modernist and constructivist tradition, elements in the work of concrete masters she grew up looking at in her father's art collection. Even if her massive array of discarded matter seems whimsical or random, all of these objects come together in a serial operation, a repetitive pattern of same old marginal memorabilia that gains new plastic force as an intentional and precise composition, from dust to work of art. Perhaps this is what Leirner means when she describes her work as an attempt to find a terminal resting place for things forgotten or without a proper destination.