When I left Micah Lexier’s apartment in downtown Toronto after a three-hour conversation one afternoon, it was with two canvas bags he had given me—both filled to the brim with all his artist books and one-offs that I could carry. I felt he wanted to convey himself to me with as much accuracy as possible. I’d never held a work of his in my hands before. I had encountered his art only in public spaces: a text collaboration with the conceptual poet Christian Bök that covered the windows of a storefront near my home, or the tiled platform of a subway station near the north of the city, which he had designed on commission. The feeling his work had always given me was about the possibility of precision and perfection as an organizing frame for the vulnerable, untamable human element.

Lexier has had more than one hundred solo shows and participated in over two hundred group shows. He works often in series, uses industrial fabricators, and collaborates frequently with writers. His conceptual works tend to play with the passage of time, as in A work of art in the form of a quantity of coins equal to the number of months of the statistical life expectancy of a child born January 6, 1995 (1995), on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Every month, the museum moves one of 906 coins from a small wooden box of coins, neatly arranged in rows, to a sloppy pile of coins in an adjacent box.

Lexier turns fifty-three this year, and when I visited him, he was planning a major retrospective at the Power Plant in Toronto, One, and Two, and More Than Two, which will be exhibited this fall. In addition to old and recent works, it will feature a group show that Lexier curated. As we spoke, we looked down into a scale model of the exhibition, placed on his dining-room table.

Our conversation revealed an artist whose thinking is constantly, fruitfully swinging between the need to organize and codify and the need to let ambiguities remain—which I saw as reflecting the tension we all experience between needing safe, controlling, codifying, “black-and-white” thinking, on the one hand, and allowing our perceptions and thoughts to inhabit the gray and mystifying areas, on the other. It seemed to be a time of transition for Lexier, a moment of softening into the gray.

—Sheila Heti

I. LET IT MAKE ITSELF

THE BELIEVER: Can you tell me about the group show?

MICAH LEXIER: So the main room of the gallery is going to be filled with vitrines. You walk into this room [points down at the model] and...