Zoe Leonard
Untitled
2002
14 ⅞ x 20 inches
C-print
© Zoe Leonard
Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth

Zoe Leonard’s color photograph from the “Tree + Fence” series documents trees interacting with and to varying degrees defying man-made constraints.

“I was amazed by the way these trees grew in spite of their enclosures – bursting out of them or absorbing them. The pictures in the tree series synthesize my thoughts about struggle. … At first, these pictures may seem like melancholy images of confinement. But perhaps they’re also images of endurance. And symbiosis.”


Image credit: Jana La Brasca

New York-based artist Zoe Leonard balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work, which merges photography, sculpture, and installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives, and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard’s practice probes the politics of representation and display. Leonard explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Her photography specifically invites us to contemplate the role that the medium plays in constructing history, and to consider the roots of contemporary photographic culture. More than its focus on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work encourages the viewer to reconsider the act of looking itself, drawing attention to observation as a complex, ongoing process.

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