Micah Lexier

Micah Lexier

Micah Lexier, artist (b at Winnipeg 13 Nov 1960), studied fine arts at the University of Manitoba and the NOVA SCOTIA COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN, where he completed a Master's of Fine Art in 1984. A conceptual artist, Micah Lexier's work embraces notions of identity and its representation. The basic elements of his work are ordinary things associated with how people identify themselves as individuals - for example, signatures, doodles, a person's name or age. While Lexier's renderings are cool and detached, often produced through a mechanical process by someone else, this distance only underscores the emotional content of his work. He has made many works that address the idea of life expectancy. He might take, for example, his own age and represent the proportion of his life that has passed measured against the length of time that, statistically, a person may be expected to live. A gay man maturing in the age of AIDS, the artist's consciousness of life's fragility belies the testimony of statistics.

Numbers are particularly significant in Lexier's work. They point to the passage of time, and in his hands a number that simply denotes a person's age can easily appear poignant. A major body of work started in 1995 is made up of the pieces titled A Minute of My Time. Each "minute" is tagged with a date and time of execution and each is based on a scribble or doodle that took the artist one minute to complete. These little drawings convey a certain sense of anonymity while remaining as personal as a fingerprint. Once made and the title noted, the drawings may be rendered as stainless steel cut-outs, printed as editions, boxed, made into reverse stencils that are spray-painted on walls and so on - renditions and contextualizations that give continuance to each of the minutes represented.

A prolific artist, Lexier has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. In addition to his studio production he has completed a number of public commissions in Ontario, as well as art projects published by such journals as Impulse, Public, Descant and Midcontinental. He has served on the boards of the Art Gallery at York University, the Power Plant (both in Toronto) and the Eye Level Gallery, Halifax. His works have been acquired by public and private collections, including those of The British Museum in London, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO, the NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA, the CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY and MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRÉAL.