Chandler Wigton, our Associate Director of Events & Studios visited Len in his studio to learn more about him and his practice!
What new art are you working on currently?
What is your process?
Len Follick has a background in photography, earning a BFA from UNM and MFA in studio art from Florida State University. At UNM he studied with artists such as Tom Borrow and Patrick Nagatani. In addition, Len has maintained a decades long career as a psychotherapist in Albuquerque.
In Len’s current work, play and experimentation are major parts of the work. Photography plays a big role, as does drawing, and ideas around installation. Everything is in flux, where images can be worked on and changed endlessly, with the goal of creating layered imagery that has an element of time within each image or set of images. Some of the images feel old, or abstracted to the point where it is hard to tell what is happening exactly, which creates a rich and thought-provoking viewing experience. Oftentimes the work is small, sometimes very small, which is intentional on Len’s part to try and invite the viewer in for a closer look. But a lot of the images are also scalable, meaning that they work at various different sizes or contribute to larger pieces. Len’s process involves manipulating photos on various apps on his iPhone, but also xeroxing them, re-photographing them and continuing to experiment. Using a wide variety of tools helps him push the work into unexpected areas. Len also frames the small photographs elegantly in black shadow boxes, sometimes grouping them together. The sense of play really comes through and makes the viewer want to see more.
Len is also interested in recombining bits of different texts into poems and experimenting with words. Over the last couple years, he did a thought and process-based drawing based on Ulysses by James Joyces, where he pulled out different phrases and sentences that stuck out to him as he did multiple deep readings of the novel. It was a way of mapping and thinking through the text and reveling in the language.
What do you get your inspiration from?
Some of the places that Len gets inspiration from include seeing other artists’ work, for example the work of Tacita Dean and Cy Twombly, the poetry of Jorie Graham and the writings of W.G. Sebald and Anne Carson, and the fiction of Olga Tokarczuk and Kevin Barry. Layered imagery, abstract imagery, and words provide inspiration. James Joyce’s Ulysses has been an area of study over the last few years where Len has done multiple readings of the novel, two times by himself, and once with a reading group. Some of the things about that novel that have had an impact on him are the wildness and inventiveness of the language, the story itself, the love, loss, and humor of it, how time is dealt with, expansive and condensed views of time existing together, and the concept of recontextualization.
What music have you been listening to lately?
Len has a broad taste in music and likes to attend live shows when possible. He listens to slowcore, live jazz at the Outpost in Albuquerque, world music amongst many others. Some artists that have been in rotation of late are Low, Sharon Van Etten, Ethel Cain, DakhaBrakha and Allison Russell. Also, Len has done silent meditation retreats for many years which continues to be an important practice for him.
