Functional Reference #1 - by Lois Teicher, b. 1938

Painted Aluminum - 1993, Dearborn, Michigan

Lois Teicher's sculptures serve as the connecting link in a visual dialogue about tension and resolution in abstract forms. The wedges are an absence of mass. She defines the wedge as a split- a metaphor for the notion of duality, of opposites forming a whole. Her sculpture may shift the nature of the visual dialogue and suggest that superficial similarities may mask differences in content. Her work bridges the dichotomy between form for form's sake and object as expression of experience. To understand her work, confront and meditate on the nature of the materials, their relationship to form, form's relationship to space and time, and the object's ability to address the complex duality of externalness to internalness. It's not so much how her geometric forms occupy space that is significant, but how she conveys the essence of being, the interiority, masked in industrial age fabrication. What could be perceived as external and distant is just the opposite. She uses sheets of painted aluminum to create a focus and become the vehicle of expression, thus bringing the viewer closer to the center of experience. The process becomes a significant factor in understanding her work and reveals an almost simultaneous development of form and idea. Her process sculpturally reveals a more intellectual approach. She began to question the nature of human response to form working through the linear image. The objects can transcend their material nature and become a metaphor for the interior, private space. Her work has to do with the dualities that exist in nature. Inner qualities of the self found within, and of the external world around us. The internal-external interplay unfolds dynamically in time and space. She views her work as deeply passionate. Her sense of idealism and commitment to engage one to interact with art has fostered an interest in creating site-specific works, which respond directly to the environment and serve as the nexus to realizing the dualities of function and non-function, and time and space.

Teicher states: My work is a re-statement of nature. In a philosophical sense, we exist in time and space. I have struggled to understand this idea of opposites within the context of nature, and in a broader sense, the whole or total life experience…My work is a metaphor for nature expressed in different shapes.

Lois Teicher is a Michigan artist and educator who has been honored with grants and awards from the Michigan Council for the Arts, Detroit Council for the Arts, Arts Foundation of Michigan, Whirlpool Foundation, C. Corcoran Gallery and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York City.