Artspace published this item, "Art Libs" for those challenged by writing Artist's Statements:
Here's mine:
Lent: A Retrospective is the first US retrospective in two decades of the western artist’s work. One of the most emotional and non-linear thinking artists of the 20th century, Lent fundamentally changed the trajectory of art history by relocating the site of production to the upstate New York and reorienting our understanding of the woman in society. Beginning with intuitive investigations in painting, sculpture and gestures, Lent soon shifted to producing immaterial works and interventions that awoke audiences to their bodies, their hatch marks and their notions of energy woman. This comprehensive survey offers a diverse selection of these original, reflective works, which have taken on new relevance during our current spontaneous political climate.
The defiant, utterly reactive piece obscurations of mind, the artist turned found defilements into surface-like forms mounted directly to the wall. In foregrounding her work’s relationship to the economies of nation and exchange, Lent shifts focus from the individual picture to the broader history of art. Her careful attention to artistic contexts, modes of repeating, and viewers’ receptions generates populated, staccato situations that contribute to tranquilizing paintings.
Among the most intriguing aspects of Lent’s working process is her continuous re-presentation, reframing, or restating in the present, a strategy through which she revisits her own drawings by transferring them to different formats—from elements to realities, tracings, and works the artist calls “something lasting: works of art”. Lent’s critical strategies of reformatting existing experiences not only suggest the idea that the experiences can have more than one life, but underpin the intentional, samsaric character of her farsighted art.