| This work comes from a constellation of ideas related to landscape painting, self-organizing matter, and the view of “things” as aggregates. While they are landscapes for the most part, I’m interested in the matter that constitutes the ground, and how it relates to human bodies and culture. Here matter is the principle actor, whether it’s gold coursing through economies or teeth, or charcoal and pigment depicting dirt and mud. It’s landscape painting after the discovery of plate tectonics—not the 19th century idea of landscape as a fixed backdrop, but the reality of dynamic upheavals of matter happening at all scales—minute to gigantic—including human affairs. | 
|
The work of Leslie Shows can be seen in July and August at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as part of Bay Area Now 5.
Courtesy of Jack Hanley Gallery.
This work comes from a constellation of ideas related to landscape painting, self-organizing matter, and the view of “things” as aggregates. While they are landscapes for the most part, I’m interested in the matter that constitutes the ground, and how it relates to human bodies and culture. Here matter is the principle actor, whether it’s gold coursing through economies or teeth, or charcoal and pigment depicting dirt and mud. It’s landscape painting after the discovery of plate tectonics—not the 19th century idea of landscape as a fixed backdrop, but the reality of dynamic upheavals of matter happening at all scales—minute to gigantic—including human affairs. This points to the shift to 20th century physics, with its view of matter as self-organizing. It also relates to the idea that the stratifications, rigidities, and flows of cultures, languages, and rocks are not just metaphorically connected, but are identical mechanisms acting in different spheres.
I use materials as themselves (paper scraps, text, rust, charcoal) and images (photographs of dust, a print of a brushstroke) to depict erosion, flow, oxidization, crystallization—they are collages, not only of materials, but also of modes of representation. In the Black Icebergs series, watery swirls of ink "draw" the melting of a solid mass that is crisp and defined above the waterline, and dissolving beneath. They are partly about growing up next to a glacier in Alaska, and having an affinity for these icy forms that suggest vast time scales and massive pressures. They are also like stable or tipping inkblots, reflecting varying states of mental coherence and dissolution.
Shape Quarry, 2007, depicts constructed human narratives, such as WWII Loony Tunes and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, playing themselves out on upturned slabs of rock. Dust-bunnies accumulate at the bottom of the slopes, while elemental black shapes form on brand-new islands.
In other paintings, plastic baggies of yellow pigment hang below a vein of yellow paint, suggesting the harvesting of sulfur or yellowcake, and the atomized elements of bodies (teeth, metals, fingernails, pools of humors) are strewn across a landscape. Instead of a false duality of “man” and “nature,” there is only a continuum of matter—biology arising from the landscape, and sentience, culture, and narrative arising from biology.
