- Released from massive pressure and at the end of its relationship to time, it becomes unstable and repeatedly flips over, becoming many different shapes on the way to oblivion. Aspects once crisp and coherent dip down and dissolve, while melting areas of murky confusion pop up, looking defined, well-formed, logical … for a time.
- The K-T Layer: a worldwide stratum of iridium from an intense space collision. It marks a boundary between eons.
- The Au Layer: gold through history, gold through teeth and around wrists and fingers, and in the Federal Reserve. Most gold has been dug up and now resides on the surface—increasingly, layers are laid by people’s desire.
- Landscape painting after the discovery of plate tectonics.
- Dynamic upheavals of matter are happening at all scales, minute to gigantic, including human affairs. This is the physics and philosophy for today, with the view of matter as self-organizing with emergent properties, and the idea that the stratifications, rigidities, and flows of cultures, languages, and rocks are not just metaphorically connected, but are identical mechanisms acting in different spheres.
- An avalanche of chipped paper from its own making.
—L. S.
Leslie Shows’ pigment, graphite, and cutout collages
investigate alternative ways to view people’s relationships to land. Shows holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She has recently been included in group shows at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Armory Show, New York; Frieze Art Fair, London, England; and Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Nova, Miami, FL. A 2006 recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award, her work was featured at SFMOMA in early 2007. She is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.