William Leavitt

The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of the work of Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt titled A Show of Cards.

The show will include over 300 ink drawings on index cards. These cards function, for Leavitt, as a bank from which individual images were selected at random to generate a narrative.  Subsequently they are incorporated into the text for Leavitt’s play “Pyramid Lens Delta”, thus titled by the first three sequential cards.  The script for the play will also be on view.

Leavitt has used similar chance processes to compose elements of the script for the theater piece “The Radio” (2002) and in his photo series “Random Selection” (1969), in which he photographed arrangements of arbitrarily selected objects together.  A collection of these photographs was included in the final issue of Landslide, a satirical art journal published by Leavitt and artist Bas Jan Ader in 1969/70.

William Leavitt received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA in 1967. He has been working and exhibiting in Los Angeles since the early 1970s. Recent exhibitions include Molecules and Buildings at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.  An exhibit of three new prints opens at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles on February 6, 2010.  In November 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will open Leavitt’s first solo museum exhibition and retrospective.

Jancar Jones