About
Andrea Legge / Bio & Statement / 2024
Andrea Legge holds a BFA from OCAD, Toronto Canada. In the 1980s she was a member of ‘The Rivington School’, a group of street artists who practiced somewhat extremely on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1998 she earned an MFA from The School of Visual Arts, NYC. In 2001, Ms. Legge co-founded Legge Lewis Legge LLC, a collaborative public art studio, with cinematographer Deborah Eve Lewis (sister-in-law) and architect Murray Legge FAIA (brother). To date Legge Lewis Legge has produced many award-winning public art and design projects, both permanent and temporary.
Andrea’s solo work concerns the reinterpretation of existing structures and tropes ranging from heroic public monuments to mass-marketing images that use (or misuse) landscape and seascape.
Ongoing bodies of work, ‘Exercses in Rewilding’ and 'ships+at+sea', reflect a desire to respond to the commercial commodification of nature. Marketing images for fashion, luxury goods, yachts and cruise vacations that use landscape as referent is re-represented using hand retouching in acrylic paint on photo-printed canvas. The frames for these works originate from photos taken of ornate frames found in the European Painting sections of western art and antiquity museums. Photogrammetry software and printing then reinterprets this often surreptitiously gathered photographic data, resulting in a blurry, degraded or 'low res' 3-dimensional version of the existing frame.
Another ongoing project, ‘Subjective Heroism’ seeks to reinterpret and re-model whole monuments and heroic structures in the same way. Heroic monuments are photographed using a strictly hand-held and limited photo capture ritual and by collaborating with photogrammetry apps. This introduces chance into the sculptural process by allowing technology to dictate form. These surprising forms are then printed as tabletop sculpture in recyclable PLA. Some sculptures are filled with reclaimed leadshot, lending a noted heft to the work, both formally and metaphorically.
Within this body of work Andrea is developing ‘Overwinter’; an interactive public art project concerning 19th century polar explorers stuck for polar winters in icebound ships. Andrea researched Overwinter by participating in The Arctic Circle Residency in October 2022, a sailing expedition for scientists and artists in the Arctic Ocean near Svalbard, Norway. This research was generously funded by an Arts Abroad grant from The Canada Council for the Arts.
Please visit andrealegge.com for Andrea’s complete solo works and leggelewislegge.com for Andrea’s collaborative public art catalogue.
GRAPHIC DESIGN, PRINT PRODUCTION & RETOUCHING: Concurrent with her art and design practice, Andrea is a freelance graphic designer and retoucher and most recently was Art Director of SHAPE Magazine (Meredith Corp.) For examples of this work see ‘Graphic Design’ tab on home page.