Vernacular Door I,Vernacular Door II
Marietta Patricia Leis
Created : 1986
Donated : 1993
Medium : Mixed media/two-dimensional
Dimensions: 33 inx25 in
Located: 2nd Floor,Northwest Hallway
Marietta Patricia Leis (b. 1938)
Corrales
“I see doors in my mind’s eye as I think about people, places, and events. I see door before I see the person within. I see door before I pass to the world outside. Doors contain multi-layered realities; this satisfies my Rashomon philosophical concern of there being as many truths to a single reality as there are people to perceive it.”
Marietta Patricia Leis has chosen the door as a formal visual element and as a metaphor for human issues in her work. These two pieces are part of her series on doors. Leis claims that her history is “interwoven with doors.” She paints, constructs, reconstructs, and transforms doors. She does so using building materials and found objects, as well as traditional artistic materials in a process combining several mediums. It is important that the pieces possess an intense tactility that evokes a sensory, visceral response from the viewer. The heavy layering and texturing of her work manifest her concern with overlapping the dichotomy of old and new, historical and contemporary, and the dualities of realities, where one person sees something one way and another sees it another way. Leis considers her working process similar to that of an excavation dig; for her it is an “unearthing, examination, and assimilation of the past resulting in a synthesis with the present.”
Marietta Patricia Leis was born in Newark, New Jersey. She began her artistic career as a performer, an actress, and a dancer, but she has always drawn and painted. She lived and worked in New York City and Los Angeles before moving to New Mexico in 1982. She studied art at the University of New Mexico and continues to live and work in Corrales, New Mexico.
