Pocket Utopia is pleased to present “Photo Still,” a solo exhibition by Ellen Letcher. The exhibition illuminates the artist’s individual and intensely innovative approach to art making in her use of many different media, from unprimed canvas and paint to photographs and laser-prints, to collaged magazine and book-pages.

Wresting images from glossy magazines and pasting them down with paint, Letcher creates a highly idiosyncratic collection of pictorial data. She replays this device of painting and pasting, maintaining a graphic energy while carefully editing, and anything might and does happen along the way (for instance, an impression of a leaf falls outside one of Letcher’s gridded, brushed blue-glue and pink strokes). Evidence of a cup of tea is plastered by active orange paint strokes while on another one of Letcher’s pages, Muslims pray within a lattice of painted pink, orange, and blue.

Letcher doesn’t take pictures — she jags their contours with color, abutting one against another, alongside yet another within a tableau of hidden transcriptions excavated with a red, blue, pink, or orange brush. She has many influences, including her years spent in production design and more recently co-directing the now shuttered Famous Accountants gallery, thereby illustrating how visual culture gets layered and loaned sometimes from the same sources without the fidelity of precise transcription.

Ellen Letcher (b. 1972, Willoughby, OH) received her BFA in 1994 from Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, FL. Selected exhibitions include “Brooklyn Bound” at Nazareth College, curated by Rob Servo; “What I Know” at NYCAMS, curated by Jason Andrew; and “Guilty/(NOT) Guilty” at Norte Maar, curated by Sarah Schmerler. She was included in a group show at Valentine Gallery, Ridgewood, Queens. “Photo Still” is her first solo show at Pocket Utopia.

Pocket Utopia is located at 191 Henry Street between Clinton and Jefferson Streets in New York City. Hours are Wednesday–Sunday, 11am–6pm.