Monica Levy was born in Sydney, Australia.
She has been living and working between Berlin, Germany and Sydney (Gumbingyar Country) Australia, since 2013.
EDUCATION
2011 Bachelor of Fine Art, Sculpture, National Art School, Sydney Australia.
1996 Bachelor of Arts, Modern History, Social Anthropology, Sydney University, Sydney Australia.
STATEMENT
Monica Levy is an Australian artist of French/German Jewish heritage living between Berlin, and Sydney.
She works from a space of diasporic intersectionality as a neurodivergent woman working across site-specific, mixed media and painterly practice.
Her work reflects practice-based art research where embodied practice is central. This embodied practice rejects the separation of body and mind and values intuition, sensation and physical experience equally with intellectual analysis.
Technically she has developed a visual vocabulary using mainly silk, canvas, paper and ceramics. The works map emotional and physical terrain, layering experience, stories and imagery. The delicately layered remnants form series of interior allegorical landscapes, informed by an interweaving of memory and the immediately surrounding landscapes physical, intellectual and sensual.
Levy uses silk to suggest fragility and strength, skin, translucency, permeability, the silk is stretched, draped, stained, held and then contained within custom frames or frameless, intentionally. Containment within framing devices is central to referencing the constraints of juggling a sense of freedom and simultaneous restriction that is experienced constantly within a female vessel within the various patriarchal/capitalistic cultures she moves through.
Materially the works employ largely pigments, spray, pastel and acrylic in order to stain the landscapes onto the substrate, sculptural works in Porcelain and found objects support and extend this language. Travel also, is central to her practise, dislocation and temporality, immersion in the experience of the outsider, deep observation and interpretation her most instructive ouvre.
Levys long-term meditation and yoga practises, research and practical applications of movement and ritual have become central to communicating a perspective that offers, in the resultant object a space for the mind to expand, an invitation to step into an experience “outside of”.
When we reflect on Levys practice as a whole she is engaged in consistent themes around feminism, movement through conscious awareness practice. Her synthesis of sites, histories, emotions, body memory, painterly practice and anything else she might bring into the studio coalesces into a moving and changing practice reflecting her world and experiences within it.
