Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Zoe Leonard at The Museum of Contemporary Art LA



Running until March 25, Zoe Leonard: Survey is the first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum. The exhibition at MOCA looks across Leonard’s career to highlight her engagement with a range of themes, including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. More than it focuses on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work slowly and reflectively calibrates vision and form. Using repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard draws viewers into an awareness of the meanings behind otherwise familiar images or objects. A counter-example to the speed and disposability of image culture today, Leonard’s photographs, sculptures, and installations ask the viewer to re-engage with how we see. 

New York based,  Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, she has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous, questioning attention to the politics and conditions of image making and display. 

Leonard has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She has spent most of her adult life living in New York City, whose built environment has been the subject matter of much of her work such as sidewalks, storefronts, apartment buildings, chain link fences, graffiti, and boarded up windows. From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard's work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explains in a recent interview: "Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world — in short, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world."

You can go to the MOCA website HERE.

On November 6 2016, New York's High Line Art hosted an afternoon of readings and performances in response to Zoe Leonard’s "I want a president" (1992), which was on view on the western pillar of The Standard, High Line, through March 2017. 
In the video linked HERE Zoe Leonard reads her text I Want a President (1992).










No comments: