Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
DISPLAY OF PROPERTIES
(2009)
Leslie Shows
b. 1977, Juneau, Alaska. Lives and works in San Francisco.
Acrylic, paper, pins, and flags
28 x 43 feet
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco
Leslie Shows’ paintings with mixed media collage forefronts the geological underpinnings of land formations while turning to the imaginary to visualize the energetic waves, both scientific and metaphysical, that hover around large masses of land and its contiguous relationship with the sky and bodies of water.
For Display of Properties, Shows sets flags of different types and sizes above cascades of marbleized swirls of poured colors that appear to drip down the wall as if they are seeping into it. Drained of all their color and projecting out from the wall, on the perpendicular, they wave gently, regally, at the upper edge. The colors, freed from the confinement of the flags, now serve another purpose as they blend with the register of geological time and glacial speed. Arranged in multicolor pours on paper, the works were inspired by the water formations on the rock faces at Zion National Park in Utah. They have been conceived in the spirit of Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown (1969), where asphalt was poured down a hillside from the tipped bed of a dump truck. Through the force of gravity, the asphalt’s own mass determined its form based on the qualities of its sluggish materiality.
Shows’ flags also lack their telltale insignia, visual symbolic codes that have long indicated a condition of belonging within human civilization. Three sets of glyphs and crests—heraldic, narrative, and abstract—that have been excavated from the flags, have migrated to the bottom of the pours. These creatures and symbols that represent imaginary realms and territories of the mind as well as finials at the top of flagpoles retain the individuality that once marked the flags. Shows makes visceral and visible the descriptions and ideas about the material processes of nature in relationship to the systems of human collectivity discussed in Manuel De Landa’s influential 1997 book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. In the world that Shows creates time, space and semiotics are codependent and when separated from each other, the signified is able to float free from the signifier, and meld with a time of no history. She nests human experience within the slower framework of the geological time of rock formation.
Recent solo exhibitions were held at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York and ODC Gallery, San Francisco. Group exhibitions include, Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA, Oakland Museum of California, and A Mind Meld is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. Shows also participated in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial Bay Area Now 5 in 2008. She was a 2006 recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award.
— Betti-Sue Hertz