Marius Lehene: Random Walk With Drift
October 18 – January 27, 2013 @ BMoCA

The exhibition Random Walk with Drift introduces the work of Fort Collins, Colorado based artist Marius Lehene. Originally from Romania, Lehene explores ideas surrounding displacement, immigration, individual and cultural identity, and the evolving processes by which they are continuously constructed, disassembled, and rearranged. Random Walk With Drift features Lehene’s drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, and three-dimensional work, including an installation that continues to evolve during the exhibition.

Starting with sketches of his immediate surroundings, captured while driving, Lehene develops dense, multi-layered two- and three-dimensional works based on these blind line drawings. Networks of repeatedly traversing lines are interspersed with the discernible outlines of random buildings, a traffic light here, an electrical post there, like landmarks on a roadmap that documents a journey through an increasingly complex and difficult to navigate landscape.

With the acute insight of the familiar outsider – both in his current and former home – Lehene identifies the framework upon which personal and cultural identities are constructed as random and interchangeable. What we consider essential to our understanding of self is in reality the sum of arbitrary decisions, chance encounters, and compulsive behavior.

Marius Lehene was born in Romania in 1972 and moved to the United States in 1998. He currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado where he is an associate professor in the Department of Art at Colorado State University. Lehene holds an MFA from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas (2001) and a BA in Economics from Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (1996).