Between 2004 and 2005, Lance Letscher had nine one-person gallery exhibitions of new work. Four were in Texas: one in Austin, his hometown, and the other three in Dallas, Houston, and Beeville, a small Hill Country town that boasts a local museum. Other exhibitions were in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, Albuquerque, and Barcelona. Gathering the material needed to create the collages for these and all his exhibitions requires Letscher to hit area estate sales. They are always good sources for not only old books, the bedrock material of the artist's work, but also handwritten correspondence and other paper ephemera. In addition to estate sales, he shops thrift stores and the closeout bins of a local used book and record store. But at a time when even the minimal expenditure required by these venues could be burdensome, one of Letscher's most important sources, since the mid-1990s, has been the dumpster behind that same used book and record store. As prices go, free is hard to beat.

What he has pulled from that dumpster over the years are objects judged absolutely unsalable at any price by the store they come from. Hopelessly scratched LPs Letscher tosses back into the dumpster, since what he wants are their cardboard album covers. He also finds out-of-date textbooks, of no possible value except to himself; he wants their matte cloth covers and foxed endpapers. He may also incorporate their titles—either absolutely ordinary or esoteric—into his work. More recently he has been drawn to those textbooks with bright, laminated bindings. Secondary-level textbooks are of interest because teenagers treat them roughly, doodling and writing on the endpapers. This mode of self-expression starts early. Letscher likes children's books heavily annotated in crayon and markers by their preadolescent owners.

For over ten years, Letscher has been a frequent—and possibly the least alarming—visitor to this dumpster. As in his studio, he works methodically among this detritus, sorting what is of interest from what is of no use. When store employees visit the dumpster while Letscher is at work, he reports that they seldom say anything and rarely ask questions. It's worth noting that this is Austin, Texas, where a combination of politeness, disinterest, and an everyday experience of the odd work together to leave someone like Letscher undisturbed while making his selections. But one day in 2004, someone whom I like to imagine was a recently promoted assistant manager came out and asked Letscher, who was up to his knees in piles of books, LPs, and magazines, exactly what he was doing. Letscher explained that he was an artist, and would have said more but the store employee got quickly to his point. He wanted to make sure that Letscher wasn't the dumpster diver who left a mess of discarded trash scattered around the bin, trash that then blew all over the employee parking lot. Once Letscher assured the young man that what he didn't take would go back into the dumpster, the situation was resolved.

What Letscher didn't have a chance to tell his interrogator was that all this rawest of raw material would go into his studio and become part of what, over the past decade and to this present moment, has developed into an increasingly complex body of work. Some of it would be only slightly altered and presented in small paper collages, but other elements would be cut and pieced together to create elaborate compositions as large as 60 x 72 inches. Cardboard, cloth bindings, and paper would be reduced to strips of color and fragments of information. They would be arranged into vertiginous stacks of concentric rectangles, or formed into pinwheels that overlap and push against one another for space on the surface of Letscher's compositions. Some materials would be cut into delicate fretwork suggesting the structures of wooden ships, and other bits would find their way into a variety of different motifs that Letscher is just beginning to explore. This is concentrated studio work, in which Letscher combines the daily dedication and long hours of a skilled craftsman with the vision of a sophisticated artist.

***

Letscher's magisterial transformations of cast-off material are far removed from the first works I saw by the artist in Dallas almost two decades ago. With Letscher it has not been a matter of stylistic development so much as a total reinvention of himself and his concerns. I had been told back in 1989 that there was a new gallery in town called N. No. 0—spoken as "North Number Zero"—and that I should check it out. The gallery was showing "some sculptor from Austin" that no one locally had ever heard of. At a time when galleries were beginning to occupy spaces east of downtown in an area known as Deep Ellum, N. No. 0 had an unlikely address on the very edge of downtown, near City Hall.

When I found the place, I entered a dark room with a handful of sculpted objects isolated by spotlights. (Letscher had another show at N. No. 0 the next year, and when I think of the work he exhibited there, I know I am combining elements from both exhibitions into a single memory.) At least two works were in white marble, a pair of child's ballet slippers and a baby's mattress or large pillow, the hard material carved into gentle crumples as though it had been recently slept on. In a period dominated by Neo-Expressionist paintings and free-for-all installations, finely crafted marble sculpture seemed uncanny and offered viewers a guiltily atavistic visual pleasure. These tender works were offset by two more sinister constructions: a tiny, abject wheelchair made of lead that was really too small for even a child, and an attenuated wooden chest of drawers, 84 x 7 x 7 inches, titled Tall Chest of Drawers. In Austin, Letscher taught sculpture at the University of Texas while completing his MFA, and ran a shop that gave him access to woodworking tools. He worked with them at night, thinking that a day job in cabinetry might be a viable way to make a living. During this time, Letscher also exhibited a finely crafted wooden piano, 29 x 42 x 86 inches, and two small coffins in wood and cardboard. The millwork on Tall Chest of Drawers was on a professional level, but none of the drawers were functional. In a similar vein, the piano was a wooden structure shaped like a piano, but sealed shut and without any of the mechanics of a musical instrument. The shifts and scale Letscher brought to these objects, and their eccentric placement in the gallery space, sent contradictory messages about image and function, hardness and softness, tender feelings and subtly brutal realities.

The tenderest work in this exhibition was a print, a hand-painted photo-lithograph that, like the sculptures, presented an expressive image that did not try to disguise the mechanics behind its manufacture. For a moment I saw a young angel with large wings, holding his arm across his eyes as he faced a blinding, divine light. Almost immediately the angel became a small boy in his underwear, probably standing in a driveway shielding his eyes from the lights of a parked car. Letscher created the wings by painting directly on the lithograph. The angel was a touchingly human divine messenger.

When he discusses these early works, Letscher links them to the emotional traumas of childhood, although they are leavened with a transcendent element. One work that seemed at the time to go too far into the traumatic realm was a miniature autopsy table made of lead pressed over wood. Letscher's exhibitions spoke of absence, but this evocation of the mortician's workshop was truly unnerving. It was his use of lead that added most to this effect. He was, at this time, choosing each of his materials for their specific emotional weight and cultural connotations. The wooden pieces spoke of a handyman-like workshop practice, such as Dad might engage in out in the garage. The marble, on the other hand, was a fine art material with a history stretching back to antiquity. The lead, which Letscher used for his most melancholy confrontations with mortality, was supple and seductive but possessed well-known poisonous qualities.

In 1992, Letscher presented a room of small marble sculptures as part of a group exhibition at Laguna Gloria Museum in Austin. Encouraged by the results, he ordered a large block of marble from a distributor in California and had it delivered to his studio. For eight months he worked with this inert mass, but ultimately had to admit that the work was going nowhere. "The interest and excitement that inspired the investment in the stone quickly drained away," he says. "Soon enough it began to take on a heavy, doom-filled symbolism that seemed to represent my life as an artist and my life in general."

Letscher had been one of those kids who had made art in the kitchen and on his bedroom floor. He had known from an early age that he wanted to be an artist, and he accepted discipline as a major component of the artistic life. Confronting the wall he had run up against with the marble sculpture, which was becoming exquisitely refined and yet posing practical problems for handling, exhibiting, and marketing, he remembered a time when he had drawn his way out of a similar impasse. And so he stepped away from the work he was becoming known for, and began drawing as "a form of research."

Although Letscher had recently made both a skull and a small branch with two leaves in marble, his sculpture had largely focused on the manufactured world. Once he was drawing, nature dominated his imagery. He produced simplified botanical illustrations and depictions of groves of bare trees. In 1996 he showed a series of wasp nests at the James Gallery in Houston. Early in this process, Letscher began to cut out parts of the drawings and glue them on to paper and masonite mounts, creating density and a sense of space. The words that appeared as part of the compositions both evoked landscape elements and commented on the absence of landscape in the collages themselves.

Around 2000, the landscape elements of his increasingly dense collages found their fullest expression in small, heavily layered works roughly held together by industrial staples. These small pieces, seldom more than 8 x 12 inches, evoked specific locales and weather conditions. Lowering skies weighted some compositions, while others opened onto bucolic expanses. But, simultaneously with these works, Letscher was developing a more purely abstract imagery. Another major transformation was in the offing.

The late 1990s found Letscher traveling a great deal, and the landscapes he observed were frequently seen from airplanes. This overhead view reduces landscape to pattern, and pattern was already of interest to him as a result of his growing involvement with quilts and other functional crafts. "I was having ideas about making things based on a design strategy that was answerable to utility and necessity instead of more conventional art world paradigms," he said. Concurrently, he was discovering in Outsider Art—specifically work from the Prinzhorn Collection and Adolf Wölfli, with its obsessive patterning and strong emotional content—work that struck "a strong chord with my experience, but also resonated with work that I had been making instinctively for most of my life. [Outsider Art] relaxed a lot of the boundaries that I had been working within, and justified a freer and more radical mode of justifying choices and decisions made while working." Letscher tried out new ideas first on paper, and then moved on to increasingly ambitious works that grew into the complex, large-scale pieces he continues to focus on to this day.

***

Letscher's studio is a two-story structure behind his home on the west side of Austin, the city where he was born in 1962, attended twelve years of secondary school, and received both a BFA and MFA from the University of Texas. Now it is also the city where he and his wife have raised their own family of two boys. When Letscher bought the house in 1995 and added the studio a year later, the neighborhood was in the flight path of the Austin airport, and property was a bargain. The airport has since moved, and the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is dotted with new contemporary structures, many by recent graduates of the UT Austin architecture program. The Letscher home is becoming something of a compound in the changing neighborhood, protected from the street by a picket fence and a hedge of oleander, coral vines, and datura.

The studio, at the end of the driveway, has a tight entrance that opens onto a spacious ground-floor workspace with stairs leading to a similar space upstairs. I've only seen the studio when it has been "cleaned up" for company, but given Letscher's personality and work habits it is hard to imagine that it is ever a particularly chaotic environment. Finished work stands propped against walls or spread on tables. A large collage on masonite lies on a table covered with the clamps that hold elements to the surface. They remain clamped until the wallpaper glue Letscher uses on his work dries and sets the composition in place.

Although Letscher no longer handcrafts work in marble and wood, his practice remains labor-intensive. I asked him once about assistants, and he said he has someone who comes in for about twenty hours a month to help with the packing and shipping of works for exhibitions. Reflecting on the sheer amount of labor involved in producing his work, I commented, "So do you just work all the time?" Letscher replied, "No. I only do half a day on Saturday, and I take Sundays off."

Perhaps more artists than I realize maintain, like Letscher, the hours of a nineteenth-century shopkeeper, but his is a formidable commitment to getting the work done. "If you are a farmer and you have to plow ten acres, you have to resign yourself to the fact that it is going to take half the day," he told another interviewer. To me he mentioned that sometimes at night, while watching TV with the family, he will use the time to cut paper for the next day's work. But he is comfortable with the tedious component of his process. "My work is really slow and repetitive. . . . You have to go through almost excruciating boredom to be spontaneous and creative, to get to a place where the work really flows." For eight hours a day he combines experience and improvisation. As he described the process to an interviewer in 2004, "It is mysterious in a mundane way."

Beginning a work almost always involves a variation on a motif he has explored before. Changes and new imagery develop slowly over time. "I am not necessarily conscious of [the changes] as they occur. It could be very gradual and easily take a year for a new branch to grow. . . . I like to think I work in a manner of fruitful repetition." But this repetition is not a process of fine-tuning that implies some end product representing the apotheosis of a particular motif. Letscher's subtle repetitions involve his mind and hand remaining open to the possibilities he finds in the materials he has gathered, the templates he has cut, and the always-unfinished business of discovering how they might all come together at any one particular time.

When Letscher first told me that he worked from boxes of gathered materials, I imagined color-coded containers that would help him organize the palette for a particular work. It turns out, however, that the boxes of source material are more likely to be organized by the date when, and location where, he collected them. Even after has he has a motif in mind, he remains open to how the look of the piece will take shape. For a time he says he tried a "role playing" approach, imagining a character and creating a set of rules around how that character would create a work. But he strives to keep the process, especially at this early stage, as open-ended as possible. "The verbal, conscious mind can be irritating and distracting," he says.

Just what is in Letscher's boxes? First, there are the covers and endpapers of lots of books. These faded cloth bindings and foxed papers provided the earth tones that defined so much of Letscher's earlier work, and still play a large part in certain compositions. The artist also finds old correspondence and children's exercise books, pages with more or less legible scripts that he may obscure with other layers of material or turn sideways or upside down so that the words become as much pattern as potential narrative. He has more recently discovered old cardboard LP jackets, which can offer both solid swaths of color and areas of enigmatic and evocative script, ranging from song titles to the incomprehensible coding used for ASCAP identification. When working with the LP material, Letscher avoids using the performer's name, since that would overload the image with whatever specific response a viewer might have to a particular singer. Song titles, on the other hand, may be familiar but remain more open-ended in their connotations. And the songs he chooses are either totally obscure or have been interpreted by dozens of singers over the years.

Illustrated books, magazines, and sheet music provide images Letscher sometimes leaves intact but more often truncates into near-abstract bits of information. One of the constant surprises of his work is that, with both the illustration and LP material, often the barest scrap of image or even a particular color can conjure—for viewers of the proper age or experience—the exact period and sometimes even the exact work Letscher has disassembled. This could create a minefield of potential nostalgia that would encourage his audience to find a cozy spot for themselves in the work, but Letscher refuses to let the imagery become cloying. The intricate compositions demand the viewer's close attention. If while exploring them we find landmarks with intense personal meaning, we know that they are there in the service of Letscher's vision for this particular work, and that our personal response to a specific element is only one component of the overall experience.

***

Letscher may complain that the "verbal, conscious mind can be a distraction" while making his art, but he approaches his work with a rich background in art history and specific enthusiasms for not only utilitarian crafts and Outsider Art but also certain major figures from both his time in art school and, more intriguingly, fin-de-siècle Vienna. In Letscher's Austin studio, the neurasthenic atmosphere of decadence and indulgence surrounding Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt quite frankly does not come to mind, but once those figures have been evoked, you see how they have informed the jewel tones often found in Letscher's more recent work. Although he is from a later generation, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the Viennese painter, sculptor, architect, and theorist who has a bigger reputation in Europe than in the United States, is also among Letscher's influences. From this triad of Austrians, Letscher learned much about color and the visual power of intense, obsessive patterning.

"I started looking at Schiele when I was a preteen, around ten or eleven. I found a book about him at the library," Letscher says. Thirty years later that initial encounter would find its expression in a work that is one of Letscher's few direct homages to a specific work of art. He based the collage Edith's Dress (2004) on Edith in a Striped Dress, Schiele's full-length portrait of his wife. In the Schiele portrait, Edith stands against a neutral background, her pale oval face slightly anxious and her body bent a bit forward. Her striped dress, a richly patterned but by no means luxurious creation reportedly pieced together from drapes, reaches to her ankles. Much as his views from airplanes taught him to examine landscape for pure pattern, Letscher emphasizes the fabric's pattern by focusing in on the part of the dress that begins at the waist, covers the hips, and begins its cascade toward the floor. In this subtly erotic, truncated view, the printed pattern of the original material becomes a new configuration of cut and pasted paper strips, no longer a painted image of an elaborate motif but a physical object closer in spirit to the original fabric.

When Letscher discusses influences, he engages very little with the history of collage. He does mention a fondness for Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield, whose satirical and political work seems far removed from Letscher's practice, but the more traditional heritage of collage and assemblage that would include Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, and others in that line, he comes right out and describes as "old hat and a little boring." It is in utilitarian crafts and Outsider Art that his ways of assembling a work have their strongest roots. But Letscher worries that any discussion of influences can lead to "gross oversimplification. I think that influences trigger creative energy to flow in response to a similar energy in the influencer's work. Sometimes seeing something will offer a missing piece of the puzzle or point the way toward resolution. In that sense, influence isn't about big course adjustments, but more about overcoming small obstacles in the work."

Whatever his influences and art historical background, Letscher thinks by making things, incorporating years of experience into the creation of his increasingly ambitious works—works ambitious in scale, complexity, and the artist's willingness to follow leads that developed unconsciously over the years. "It used to be all chance and discovery," Letscher says. "Now I am orchestrating what I want, instead of what I have happened to find." Since Letscher exhibits so often—an average of six shows a year for the past three years—and because the work develops around a slowly evolving set of motifs, he is sensitive to the idea that he is producing work aimed at his established market. But in the studio he draws a clear distinction between production and creation. "Production has to do with meeting deadlines and making sales. Creating is always about experimentation, risk taking, and not relying on comfortable, decision-making precedents."

***

Even as he becomes known for large-scale works mounted on masonite, Letscher continues to use smaller works on paper as a testing ground for new ideas, or for taking more established motifs in new directions. Such pieces are both studies and finished works in themselves, almost always more spare in their composition than the larger works, and more playful. They are often no larger than a single sheet of notepaper, although some that could still count as "studies" are not on paper at all, but rather on the severed cloth bindings of books. Block Head is such a work, unlike any composition so far found in Letscher's oeuvre but an elegant demonstration of his mind at work. The image is put together with spindly columns and rows of small cut paper pieces that offer little support or sense of weight. A large block of collaged elements overwhelm and unbalance the upper right corner. Of course, all Letscher's work is composed of scraps, but the components here seem to be pulled together in a desultory fashion and pieced onto the support out of a mild curiosity to see what will happen when one thing is put next to another. The title possibly refers to the children's game in which players stack oddly shaped blocks until one player is unable to proceed without making the whole structure collapse. Glue and a flat surface allow Letscher to play the same game, and to defy gravity.

The small Letscher work on paper titled Double H contains a fragmented element, with intertwined curving lines that are clearly not a proper double helix but, given the title, suggest the discovery of DNA. Also spread through the composition, along with agricultural information and some largely indecipherable handwritten notebook pages, are strips from the cover of an old paperback edition of a Dr. Thorndyke mystery. Dr. Thorndyke, who solved crimes using forensic science, was featured in a popular series from the 1920s. A twenty-five cent price tag, clearly from a different paperback, places the material in time, although—perhaps because of the popularity of the CSI franchise—the books have returned to print. It is unlikely that many in Letscher's audience will know the history of Dr. Thorndyke, or that the artist himself knew anything about the character before he chose the book from a bin of closeouts, but just the suggestion of an old-timey detective story, and the reminder of the discovery of DNA, lend the work an air of mystery and discovery.

New motifs put in their early appearances in Letscher's works on paper. Thinly outlined squares and rectangles overlap across the surface of Funny Joke. They float on the surface, but in larger works such as Nine and Red Umbrella, their outlines thicken and their overall density increases to the point where they suggest a deep space difficult to enter. One of Letscher's most recent motifs appears on paper in Sugar #2. He refers to the solid circles interlinked by straight lines in this work as "molecules," and they do come off as a homemade version of space age design from the 1950s and 1960s.

This might be as good a time to mention that Letscher is very good with titles, which is no small accomplishment. To my knowledge, he never hides behinds the "Untitled" option, nor does he resort to using "Untitled" and then following it in parentheses by what is obviously the title. Letscher names his things and he names them well. Once you know the title you may sometimes find it buried in some fragment of paper or cardboard within the work, but this does not lead to one of those "Oh, now I get it" moments. You have discovered the title while examining the work in a process that possibly parallels the way the artist discovered the title while assembling the collage. The titles are evocative, literate, and sometimes quite funny. They gracefully insinuate their way into your experience.

Letscher's works on paper tend to be open and airy, but the larger works mounted on masonite have become increasingly compacted. Letscher reports that he began to feel that playing areas of color off expansive areas of white in the large works had become a kind of crutch for him, and he has moved consciously toward depicting denser, shallower spaces. In these large works concentric rectangles, pinwheel shapes, and boatlike objects crowd the surface, often leaving little breathing room for the viewer but offering a dazzling visual experience. When Letscher first began to move away from his more referential landscape work, he built stacks of color from thinly cut cardboard, although a horizontal format continued to imply landscape. The artist's development as a colorist and abstractionist, however, meant that those trends were gradually taking precedence. (Developing a chronology for these motifs is difficult, since so many seem to have appeared almost simultaneously, and continue to develop in parallel directions.) Letscher's compositions of concentric rectangles come closest to maintaining his ties to landscape, although many of the structures he builds could also suggest unsteady towers in a fantastic urban setting. This architectural element in Letscher's work could be the artist's most direct acknowledgment of the influence of Hundertwasser's work.

Even in the largest collages, the rectangular elements are seldom larger than eight by four inches, with interiors that reduce down incrementally to a single strip of whatever material Letscher is using. Although he may use templates for much of his work, everything is hand cut, and this process shows in the slight irregularities of the edges of the pieces and how they meet. Mixing paper and cardboard in these works, with their subtle variations in thickness, adds another level of movement to the already pulsating compositions.

Whereas Letscher's earliest abstract works grouped colors into bold, monochromatic sections, these more recent works leave the viewer sensing the color progressions as much as detecting them outright. In Fruit Cake, a pyramidal structure based on elements that emphasize white slowly manifests itself on the left side of the collage. Elsewhere, an almost random dispersal of color elements, possibly suggesting the gelatinous fruits we all know from that famously unwanted holiday treat, fills the surface. Then there is another intrusion: A strong orange line supports a broader tower of orange. Throughout the composition you can see how Letscher has accommodated the shifting spaces his rectangles have created. One image that comes to mind is that of a rubble-filled stone wall, exactly the sort of utilitarian structure to which the artist would be drawn.

Keep Going is a vertical composition, consisting of narrow rectangles with a single strip down the middle. Letscher has stacked them into vertiginous columns. Whereas Fruit Cake pulsates, Keep Going has a flowing motion, and like so many of Letscher's works, suggests that it could easily extend beyond the artificial boundary set by the support.

Whereas the concentric rectangles pulsate or flow, Letscher's pinwheel shapes push against the surface, crowding against one another in an explosion of color. Each circular shape is composed of between twenty and thirty narrow wedges of cut paper that meet at a center point and form a more or less perfect circle. A circle implies 360 degrees, but one thing you learn quickly when searching for "rules" in Letscher's work is that no sooner do you think you have uncovered one than you find it contradicted. In many of the pinwheels, you can see where Letscher fudges on the geometry to make things come out right.

Needles, with its central area of pale blue pinwheels surrounded by similar shapes in beige and off-white, is an elegant and restrained work, but Letscher has over the years ramped up both the color and complexity of his compositions. The pinwheels in works such as Three Star and Tough Week not only have bolder color but also present sharper, almost grating contrasts and areas of material cut wide enough that more of the information from the original materials comes through. A commitment to commercial colors based on man-made chemical compounds marks one of the major transitions in Letscher's work over the past few years. The earth tones, however rich and varied they might be in a single work, kept Letscher tied, to some degree, to landscape. "I realized," he says, "that I had barriers to certain colors." He was thinking specifically of phthalo greens and blues, magentas, and an entire range of pinks. "Now I am consciously confronting those colors, and it is forcing me to become a better colorist with a broader vocabulary."

Letscher puts that vocabulary to excellent use in a work such as Boat vs. Train, in which he frames a cluster of burgundy-colored pinwheels with illustrational material. He applies this material in large enough swatches that we can both decipher more of the imagery than is usual with a Letscher work, and also are made aware of the cheap commercial world of children's publishing in which much of it originates. There is not a trace of the childish handwriting that personalizes some of Letscher's other work; instead we see a cheaply illustrated small wooden rowboat, a very long freight train, and a question from some unknown children's book: "Who wants to run away?" Although very open-ended, there is a strong sense of narrative tension in Boat vs. Train, as there is in several newer works in which Letscher uses a similar framing device.

Two new bodies of work, incorporating images of boats and screens, involve paper cut so thin that no residual information remains legible. Unlike the concurrent works with their new emphasis on narrative, these works are dominated by color and formal abstraction, although the boats come loaded with symbolic meaning. When I first saw these slightly oval shapes pointed at either end, I thought they were leaves, but in a collage from 2001 Letscher floated these same shapes across the surface and titled the work Boats. The imagery became more clear once he stripped the boats down to the fretwork supporting their canoelike shapes. These vessels are not seaworthy, but in a work like Red X the artist layered them into a dense, ordered network of crisscrossing beams that exerts a strong physical presence despite the boats' apparent insubstantiality. Letscher's screens consist of thin strips of paper, in strict vertical and horizontal alignment, that form a tight mesh obscuring almost all of the images or patterns beneath it. More substantial blocks of color worked into the mesh lends the composition the feel of a mended surface. This sense of repair work is evident in a work like Sons of the Pioneers.

***

When Letscher describes his work, he talks about the sense of an interior, psychological space implied by his compositions—"a space," he says, "seen in the mind's eye." Seldom is such a psychological space arrived at by such physical procedures: what is seen in the mind's eye—a very sophisticated eye, in Letscher's case—has been represented by cobbling together a disparate array of humble components. For almost thirty years, Letscher has been a maker of things, first naturalistic sculptures and now complex abstract collages that invite the viewer to explore them as one would the landscape of a new world. In this new world you find certain familiar elements: colors with specific emotional connotations, fragments of the culture stripped to their barest level of information, motifs familiar from the world of material culture. They, along with the sheer visual beauty of the objects, draw you in, but in many cases also abandon you. You find yourself in a not unpleasant state that is somewhere between lost and bedazzled, and the time you spend there is rewarded with a combination of revelation and delight.

Meanwhile, Letscher is back in his studio, working his fifty-hour week, creating variations on established motifs and keeping an eye out for what new patterns are making themselves known.