Across a career spanning more than four decades, New York-based artist Zoe Leonard has honed a singular artistic vision, coupling a precise engagement with the politics of image-making with acute, often poetic observations of daily life. Addressing themes that include gender and sexuality, mourning, displacement and migration, and the urban landscape, amongst others, her work in photography, sculpture and installation effects a complex consideration of the act of looking and the role of photographic culture in ordering our worlds.
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Leonard presents View from Below, a suite of photographs taken at fashion shows in the early 1990s. Produced at a moment when Leonard was engaged closely with the politics of gender, representation and display, these images are part of a larger nexus of works that saw the artist probing the mechanisms that produce and regulate the body. In this series of photographs, Leonard presents multiple and divergent perspectives
on the runway, surveying a shifting field of looks among and between models, spectators and photographers, including herself. Registering gazes that are by turns voyeuristic, objectifying and self-possessed, these images compel a broad set of questions around desire, power, performance, and subjectivity.
