Leah Oates
Written by Kristen T. Woodward.
Leah Oates, an inspired and prolific photographic artist, has been featured in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions in New York City, such as The Pen and Brush Gallery, Rush Art Gallery, WAH Center, Islip Art Museum, Denise Bibro Gallery, Momenta Gallery, and Wave Hill. Additional exhibition venues of note include Yale University, the Wexford Art Centre in Ireland, the Royal Scottish Academy in Scotland, and Toronto galleries such as John Aird Gallery, Connections Gallery, Gallery 1313, Propeller Gallery, and The Papermill Gallery. Her photographs are found in numerous private and public collections including the Art in Embassies Program in Muscat, Oman, The American Embassy in Beijing, the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, The Josie Robertson Surgery Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. She is represented by Susan Eley Fine Art in New York, and was recently commissioned to mount a lightbox installation at 42nd Street with the Manhattan Transit Authority.
We are made aware of the photographic lens in Leah’s envisaged juxtapositions of colored stripes alongside hazy discs of silhouetted trees. Circular sunspots echo the rounded camera aperture, and call to mind mechanical modus, while sharper slices of photographic imagery impart cooler digital contrast. Saturated color often communicates defiantly stark artificiality when viewed alongside delicate linear branches. The severing of the pictorial field into multiple and successive rectangles forms a quick and clipped compositional movement, imitating sequential clicks of a camera shutter. The result contains syncopated splintering of a picturesque landscape.
Leah’s recent Transitory Spaces series includes unique artist’s books made with archival paper. The book format allows a somewhat more prescribed relationship between the fragmented positioning of the disparate frames. Diptych associations naturally correlate in open page presentation, and many pairings present jarring transitions absent the solid color blocks. While humans are not physically present in Leah’s transitory images, the frequent positioning of the camera at human height focuses our attention on trees of soaring stature, with branches extending above us like open arms. The trees thus present as figural forms, and their vulnerability instinctively summons ours.
Transitory Space - Brooklyn, Bronx & Queens, New York. 7 (pictured above) employs progressive cadence between roots and branches, shifting orientation and viewers’ perceptions between two opposing pages. A large horizontal tree trunk fading into feathery roots through acute depth of field is visually suspended by amorphously saturated red hues in the bottom of the left page. The connectivity of tree roots becomes recalled on the opposing right side, as the horizontal trunk leads us to a snowy severed section of another tree. An abrupt sensation of inversion and value reversal disorients the landscape. Spidery white roots below the spectral trunk evoke capillary veining when viewed next to crimson red, perhaps sequenced to imply a shared corporal consanguinity between living things.
Leah’s photographic documentation and manipulation of the landscape to suggest constant flux of existence captures an ephemeral and precarious beauty. A responsive approach can be seen in her use of color fields and textural forms, as pieces flip between high chroma hues and subtle inclusions of reflected light. Opaque turquoise and lavender rectangles positioned next to tree-filled landscapes appear to sample and amplify color in corresponding selections of the natural world. However, the solid color bands could imply an unwelcome mechanical intrusion into nature, rather than formal provision for visual rest- perhaps they represent ghosts in the machine.
