LESLIE SHOWS
2012-04-30Shows 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.
Opposite – Face A, 2011
Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2012
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 south 12th street
Omaha
NE
68102
Nebraska
