LESLIE SHOWS
Face K, 2011
Ink, acrylic, Mylar, sand, canvas, plastic and engraving on aluminum
82 x 48 inches
Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist
LESLIE SHOWS
April 27 - July 28
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27 | 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 28 | 12 noon
Leslie Shows' expansive and cryptic paintings connect geologic time scales with urgent and intense imagery. In her new work, sculptures of cast sulfur and visually rich, abstracted images of pyrite suggest ruptures of language, meaning, and substances.
Shows initiated this body of work while in residence at the Bemis Center in the summer of 2011. Beginning with digitally scanned images of pyrite, Shows constructs and collages large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, with materials including ink, acrylic paint, Mylar, Plexiglas, metal filings, sand, crushed glass, and canvas. The works are spectral, reflective, and aim to accurately depict their object source, yet engage the alchemical mythology of the material. A second body of work includes a series of cast sulfur objects. Shows' casts of everyday forms—remotes, telephones, toys—conjoin cast-away objects with an element that is used heavily in industrial processes.
Shows has built deep resonance between the two series and a video work, The Cares of a Family Man(2012). The iron pyrite landscape works are illusory, artificial representations of fool's gold, an economically useless yet psychologically and historically charged sulfide mineral. In contrast the sulfur sculptures are chalky, a waxy opaque yellow copy of senseless objects. The Cares of a Family Man utilizes Kafka's story about an object named Odradek to illustrate the disorienting dimensions and unstable perceptive qualities shared by all her works.
For Shows the pyrite landscapes present "a field of features ... doing landscape painting is about being able to spread out details ... where I could have multiple interactions between multiple things—formal, linguistic and conceptual interactions between different images and materials that I would choose to put in a painting together. That's the engine of the painting."
Shows is keen to reveal "ways culture and human thought are tied to the structure of objects." Together her works explore value systems, geologic and industrial flows, and human biology in relation to deep time registers. Between epic scale and direct, physiological experience, Shows engages an endless feedback loop between our minds and the material world.
Leslie Shows is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.
All works courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist.
About the artist
Leslie Shows's (AIR 2011) work has most recently been exhibited at Haines Gallery, San Francisco; The Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis; Atlanta Contemporary Contemporary Art Center; and the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her work has been shown at the Orange County Museum of Art, Oakland Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shows is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, an SFMOMA SECA Award, an Artadia Award and the Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts. In addition to group shows throughout the United States, Shows has had four solo exhibitions with the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work has been written about inThe New Yorker, ArtReview and Artforum, and featured in Harper's. Shows was raised in Juneau, Alaska and currently lives in San Francisco.
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
724 south 12th street
Omaha, NE 68102
Nebraska
T: +1 402 341-7130
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
Read On... BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Omaha
Face K, 2011
Ink, acrylic, Mylar, sand, canvas, plastic and engraving on aluminum
82 x 48 inches
Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist
LESLIE SHOWS
April 27 - July 28
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27 | 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 28 | 12 noon
Leslie Shows' expansive and cryptic paintings connect geologic time scales with urgent and intense imagery. In her new work, sculptures of cast sulfur and visually rich, abstracted images of pyrite suggest ruptures of language, meaning, and substances.
Shows initiated this body of work while in residence at the Bemis Center in the summer of 2011. Beginning with digitally scanned images of pyrite, Shows constructs and collages large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, with materials including ink, acrylic paint, Mylar, Plexiglas, metal filings, sand, crushed glass, and canvas. The works are spectral, reflective, and aim to accurately depict their object source, yet engage the alchemical mythology of the material. A second body of work includes a series of cast sulfur objects. Shows' casts of everyday forms—remotes, telephones, toys—conjoin cast-away objects with an element that is used heavily in industrial processes.
Shows has built deep resonance between the two series and a video work, The Cares of a Family Man(2012). The iron pyrite landscape works are illusory, artificial representations of fool's gold, an economically useless yet psychologically and historically charged sulfide mineral. In contrast the sulfur sculptures are chalky, a waxy opaque yellow copy of senseless objects. The Cares of a Family Man utilizes Kafka's story about an object named Odradek to illustrate the disorienting dimensions and unstable perceptive qualities shared by all her works.
For Shows the pyrite landscapes present "a field of features ... doing landscape painting is about being able to spread out details ... where I could have multiple interactions between multiple things—formal, linguistic and conceptual interactions between different images and materials that I would choose to put in a painting together. That's the engine of the painting."
Shows is keen to reveal "ways culture and human thought are tied to the structure of objects." Together her works explore value systems, geologic and industrial flows, and human biology in relation to deep time registers. Between epic scale and direct, physiological experience, Shows engages an endless feedback loop between our minds and the material world.
Leslie Shows is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.
All works courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist.
About the artist
Leslie Shows's (AIR 2011) work has most recently been exhibited at Haines Gallery, San Francisco; The Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis; Atlanta Contemporary Contemporary Art Center; and the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her work has been shown at the Orange County Museum of Art, Oakland Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shows is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, an SFMOMA SECA Award, an Artadia Award and the Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts. In addition to group shows throughout the United States, Shows has had four solo exhibitions with the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work has been written about inThe New Yorker, ArtReview and Artforum, and featured in Harper's. Shows was raised in Juneau, Alaska and currently lives in San Francisco.
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
724 south 12th street
Omaha, NE 68102
Nebraska
T: +1 402 341-7130
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
Read On... BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Omaha
