LOS ANGELES, CA.- Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is presenting Many Small Cuts, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Elspeth Schulze and Leigh Suggs. The exhibition highlights the artists’ profound precision and care that goes into their creative process, while also welcoming moments of chance and randomness that allow warmth and softness. The strong visual architecture is dominated by shapes and objects resembling windows and doors: framing a view of what is beyond.
“Many Small Cuts” connotes a laborious undertaking. A new series of Leigh Suggs’ work is created using the process of Marquetry, carefully reassembling scraps of paper that were discarded from other works into one large new sheet of paper, where colors and patterns intersect to form controlled chaos. The labor-intensive cutting, assembling, and attention to detail yield intricate designs and imagery. In Schulze’s studio, artworks are highly calculated, with each piece undergoing a step-by-step plan. Ceramic and brass elements are cut with digital fabrication tools, then assembled by hand, like a puzzle, where each piece has a perfect corresponding recess in the layers of painted and shaped wood panels that serve as an architectural base. The artists are not seeking perfection, but rather precision to make sense of chaos and create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Leigh Suggs, Totem Series (Shape 8), 2024. Handcut, acrylic on Yupo, framed, 31 x 31 in. (framed).
Both Schulze and Suggs explore themes of architecture in these artworks. For Suggs, architecture translates as a concept – she considers the body as architecture: eyes as windows, hearts as doorways, arms and legs as support structures. The repeating patterns and small windows within the work, reminiscent of warp and weft in woven structures, create a directed visual experience that Suggs notes is not so far from hallucinatory. The work becomes an optical illusion, a window that is physical and spiritual. These windows were born from a reckoning with grief. After losing her father Suggs often dreamed of losing him within buildings, always finding him behind a closed door or a window. “He was always just in another room laughing at me being worried about losing him. I think about those doors and those windows… always wishing it was that simple to find him…. But also, those openings as portals to another place, space, or time.” Ultimately, the artworks connect the past and the future.
For Schulze, the ties to architecture are equally familial. The artist pulls her architectural elements and inspiration from motifs in childhood, connections with her parents and grandparents, and her experiences attending Catholic schools. The Louisiana landscape has an equally strong hand in the elements that appear in her work – dominated by water, the land is porous, plants thrive at the edge. Schulze notes:
“My maternal grandparents were architects interested in design integrated into the natural landscape. I think this influences so much of my practice. I spent a lot of time in their home in Southern Louisiana, which was sited on a narrow strip of land between the Vermillion River and a cypress and tupelo swamp. It was a simple, spare place that beautifully combined natural materials: cypress floors and ceilings with white plaster walls; windows framing the green wild pressing in from the outside. My mother, their daughter, is a ceramicist, and her work was always part of the space… Through this, I became interested in how objects hold space. My work combines these same materials in a similar graphic spareness: ceramic or plaster paired with wood.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Installation View: Many Small Cuts, Los Angeles.
My family was secular, but the region was culturally Catholic, and Catholic architecture has also deeply influenced my work. I went to a Catholic school, and loved gathering each week in the chapel, a space that was also spare and full of natural light. I stared at the windows that filtered the outside in. I often think of my wall works as windows, portals between one thing and another.”
Through this exhibition, Elspeth Schulze and Leigh Suggs come together to create a cohesive dialogue of works, often conducting studio visits and conceptualizing ideas with each other throughout the process. This method of working in tandem has yielded two separate but parallel bodies of work that offers a view into the foundations of their practices.
“It is rarely romantic to be a studio artist,” reflects Schulze, “but we keep showing up to do the work, compelled by the practice and process. Each day is like a small cut, and by showing up day in and day out, we cut through to something larger.”
Elspeth Schulze (b. 1985, Grand Coteau, LA) is a studio artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Schulze makes sculptural wall works that marry ornament with architecture, pairing geometric structure with organic, often plant-based forms. Her practice combines ceramic, wood and textile processes and pairs digital fabrication with traditional methods of making. Schulze holds an MFA in ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder, a degree in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology New York, and a BA in literature and visual art from Loyola University, New Orleans. Recent exhibition venues include Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, OK, Wasserman Projects in Detroit, MI, Tinney Contemporary in Nashville, TN, and Spring Break Art Fairs in NY and LA. She is currently an alumni-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and an upcoming artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Installation View: Many Small Cuts, Pictured: Leigh Suggs.
Leigh Suggs was born in Boone, North Carolina and currently resides in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Her most recent solo shows include Best, in Pieces (2024) with Cole Pratt (LA), Bent Out of Shape (2022) with Massey Klein Gallery (NYC), Hurry Slowly (2021) at Second Street Gallery (VA), and Reynolds Gallery Keep Coming Round (2021). Her notable group shows include Coined in the South (2022) at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, DRAWN (2021) at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Go for Baroque at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, WI (2016), NCAC Fellowship Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC (2014), and Art on Paper (2012) at the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, NC. Suggs has been awarded several grants and honors, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award, the North Carolina Fellowship Award and two City of Richmond CultureWorks Grants. Her work is a part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Weatherspoon Museum collections. And her work is included in several corporate collections, including the Federal Reserve Bank, Honeywell, Capital One, Markel Corporation, Truist Bank and Fidelity Investments.
