bert leveille collaboration

SYNAPSE Press

Northern Public Radio — by Yvonne Boose

Poets and Visual Artists Take Creativity To The Next Level In Gallery Installation

... Woodstock resident Anita Theodore said it was her second time coming to see the display. There is one piece that she said she can’t get enough of.

“It’s suspended, but still has movement. But then you've got keywords like stop and silent and dark and shadow," she explained. "So, it's a very clever, very thoughtful…and I think I'm just going to come back and look at it over and over again.”

Theodore was describing a piece by artist Bert Leveille called Synapse. Leveille collaborated with poets Annie Hex and Jennifer May. The piece was inspired by Leveille’s art coach, Paul Klein, who died of cancer this October. In an explanation of her piece, Leveille said she was working on a painting last year while Klein underwent brain surgery. She said at some point, her painting turned into an image of his brain.

Anne Burns was there with Theodore. Burns is also a fan of this piece. She suggested that the words really complement the work.

“It frames the inside moving figure. So it's...because life is just not linear, it just moves, you know, and the brain moves and I love how it just…that last stop," said Burns. ...

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Yvonne Boose reporter at WNIJ radio in DeKalb . Yvonne Boose is a 2020 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.

The entire article can be read and heard at: entire article at Northern Public Radio
author's website: YVONNE BOOSE

Vasari 21 — by Ann Landy

Through the end of the month, Bert Leveille has an installation called “synapse” at the Old Court House Arts Center in Woodstock, IL. “Leveille delivers another meditative experience and journey into consciousness,” says the press for the show. “As you approach the vault, while you may not be able to enter the installation, your mind might take you through the glass and into the vault. Leveille is one of the artists collaborating with Atrocious Poets, ‘As It Happens’ – a unique art exhibition pairing visual art and its process with poetry. Looking through poems by Annie Hex and Jen May displayed on the plexiglass enriches and expands this multidisciplinary experience.”

Newcity art 60wrd/min COVID Edition: Bert Leveille — by Lori Waxman

It can be worthwhile to consider what a painting needs. Lights? Multiple dimensions? Dancers, poets? “Synapse,” created by Bert Leveille in a seven-foot-square vault at the Old Courthouse Arts Center in Woodstock, Illinois, requires all this and then some. Installed for the last two months of 2020, also the final months of the venue’s thirty-year existence, “synapse” uses three large silvery canvases, one suspended fabric-and-wire object, and a trio of changing-color LED floor lights to bring the imagery of Leveille’s earlier paintings to life. The result resembles a dancer rendered in Japanese calligraphy, spinning slowly in a moody abstract landscape. Overlaid across this scene are related textual fragments—including the tenderhearted “inside is not so dark / when you shine / a light. stop.”—not unlike how the owners of Japanese scrolls would fill the white space around a waterfall or a gourd with lines of poetry. The words, a collaboration with the Atrocious Poets (Annie Hex and Jen May), appear suspended in the vault’s doorway, through the magical intermediary of a sheet of hung Plexiglas.

You can see this and other articles at:https://art.newcity.com/2021/01/29/60wrd-min-covid-edition-kayla-anderson-for-modern-resting-bert-leveille/