Transitory Space, Brooklyn, NYC, USA, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
-Leah, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.
At an early age, I knew that I would go into the arts but was not sure which field.
I grew up in an artistic family as my mom was a painter, my brother a painter and musician, and my dad a writer/carpenter. I explored and pursued all the arts and I acted, sang, danced, wrote, and created art. I trained for a while from age 5-11 as a classical ballerina too. When I began my early teenage years, I realized I was more interested in the visual arts. This was the right path for me as it’s been a joyous and wonderful artistic journey.
Transitory Space, Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
-These photos make it feel like several moments are happening at once. What do you want them to say about the way we experience time?
The Transitory Space series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes and this series articulates fluctuations in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.
Humans leave traces and artifacts of our consciousness everywhere in our environment. Contradictory realities can be found co-existing wherever we look. They’re in what we choose to think; what we choose to believe; and how we choose to act and they can be found in what we choose to observe.
When I look back on a moment it’s full of impressions and multiple exposures capture this. I make multiple exposures on specific frames in camera which allows me to display a more complete correlation of experiences that a single exposure just misses.
Every moment captured on film is over as soon as the shutter clicks, recording the ephemeral. Yet, in reality, there is always a visual cacophony of experience and we live in many realities at once. Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world as our perception is not fixed.
Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.
Transitory Space, Brooklyn, NYC, USA, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
-You create multiple exposures in camera on film instead of layering images digitally. How much of the result is predictable, and how much do you leave to chance?
It's left to chance mostly but with years of training and working with the same camera since college. My camera and I feel like one unit when photographing, and it just flows. My dad gave me this camera when I was twenty for my undergrad studies at Rhode Island School of Design and now I’m in my fifties. I used a Pentax K1000 with 35mm film, which is completely analog, which I love.
Transitory Space, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
-Your work beautifully sits between landscape and abstraction. What keeps you coming back to that in-between place?
My life is all about the in-between place, which is for me a less stale place to live, as this unfixed state has energy and potential. I would suggest that this is the reality for everyone, whether they recognize this or not. Life is not static or fixed, time stops for no one and change is constant. We all live in chaos and constant transition, but humans like order, safety, and comfort, me included.
The older I get, I see that the ways we try to order and organize our world can trap us into illusions about how time and the world truly work. I think now too that abstraction is closer to reality than realism, as humans do not experience life as crisp, realistic images but rather as a series of impressions. All these contradictions in life make life beautiful and magical.
Transitory Space, Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
-What's the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
The best way to check out & support my work is to view my sites & to stay in touch.
Here are my sites:
Website: www.leahoates.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/leahoates19
FaceBook: www.facebook.com/leah.oates1
Statement
The Transitory Space series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes and this series articulates fluctuation in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.
Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.
Transitory Space, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
Bio
Transitory Space, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, color photography shot with analog camera and 35mm film
Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for graduate study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.
Oates has had solo shows in NYC at Susan Eley Fine Art, The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, The Center for Book Arts, A4L Gallery, Henry Street Settlement and A Taste of Art Gallery and locally at Tomasulo Gallery in New Jersey, Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, Long Island and the Sol Mednick Gallery at the Philadelphia University of the Arts. Oates has had solo shows nationally at Anchor Graphics, Artemisia Gallery and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and internationally at Galerie Joella in Turku, Finland.
In 2018-2020 Oates had a solo show at Black Cat Artspace in Toronto and was part of group shows in the Toronto area at Black Cat Showroom, The Gladstone Hotel, GAS Art Space, Propeller Gallery, John. Aird Gallery, The Papermill Gallery, Arta Gallery, 1313 Gallery, Artscape Wychwood Barns Community Gallery, Neilson Park Creative Centre and Connections Gallery.In 2014, work by Oates was featured in group exhibitions at Sohn Fine Art in Massachusetts, at City Without Walls in Newwark, NJ, Artspace, New Haven, CT, Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago, IL, Diane Kidd Gallery at Tiffin University in OH and internationally at the Kurbas Art Centre in Kiev, Ukraine.Oates's work was reviewed in the Sunday Star New Jersey Ledger for "Layers" at City Without Walls and her work was selected for Artists Studio by curator Jill Conner.
In 2013, Oates was part of group shows in NYC with Associated Gallery, NYC, Curate NYC at chashama and Rush Art Gallery, NYC, Irreversible Magazine, Florida and at 23 Sandy Gallery and Keirnan Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Work by Oates was also part of group shows at 440 Gallery and Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, Islip Art Museum in Islip, NY, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Florida, The Housatonic Museum in Connecticut, McNeese State University in Louisiana, Black Box Gallery in Oregon, Unsettled Gallery in New Mexico and at Abcedarian Gallery in Colorado. Work by Oates was recently featured in Posit 1: A Journal of Literature and Art.
In 2011-2012, Oates was part of group show at Denise Bibro Fine Arts, NYC, the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, NY, Momenta Art Gallery in Brooklyn and was part of an exhibition curated by The Humble Art Foundation with the Magenta Foundation for the Flash Forward Photography Festival in Boston, MA. Work by Oates was recently selected for the Art in Embassies program in Muscat, Oman and Oates was part of group shows at The Aqua Art Fair Miami, The Scope Art Fair NYC, Susan Hensel Gallery, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, F(r)iction Project in Brooklyn and at the Gwen Frostic School of Art Gallery in Michigan.
Oates has been in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Momenta Art, Flux Factory, Wave Hill, International Print Center, Storefront for Art, Proteus Gowanus, Nurture Art Gallery, Elizabeth Heskin Contemporary, Gallery Aferro, Metaphor Contemporary Art and The Center for Book Arts and internationally at the Royal Scottish Academy & Open Eye Gallery in Scotland, Open Studio Gallery and Spin Gallery in Toronto, Galerie Joella and Turku City Art Museum in Finland, Swinton Art Centre and University of Northampton Art Gallery in England and at NEME and The National Centres of Contemporary Art in Russia and Cyprus.
Oates’s work has been featured or written about in numerous blogs and publications including the Phaidon Club Online Magazine, Bomb Blog, the Tampa Review, Diffusion Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, The Riverdale Press, St. Petersburg Times, the Daily Constitutional, Zingology Online Arts Magazine, Drain Journal of Contemporary Arts, Livraison Rhinoceros, Front Magazine, The Village Voice, Umbrella Magazine, The Southampton Press, the Chicago Reader and Art Squeeze.
In February 2009, Oates's work was included in "Trouble in Paradise" curated by Julie Sasse at Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona which includes work by Mitch Epstein, Kim Keever, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky and Thomas Ruff and was part of group shows at the Aqua Art Fair and and C. Emerson Fine Arts in Florida and in NYC at Randall Scott Gallery, Michael Mazzeo Gallery, Collective Gallery 173-171, The Pool Art Fair and The Bridge Art Fair.
In 2008, Oates photographed in Newfoundland, Canada and in Beijing, China. Oates has attended residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, the Caldera Foundation in Oregon, and The Taipei Arts Village in Taiwan. She is the recipient of several awards including two Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Grants, an honorable mention for Hey Hot Shot from Jen Bekman Gallery and an Artists Grant from Artist Space in NYC.
Oates’s work is in the private collections of Susan Bode-Tyson, Lise Curry, Bill Groom, Natalie Domchencho and Mark Waskow and her works on paper are in many public collections including the National Museum of Women in the Art, The Brooklyn Museum Artist Book Collection, The British Library, The Walker Art Center Libraries, The Smithsonian Libraries and Franklin Furnace at MoMA.