PHOTO: Zoe Leonard-Al Río / To the River

Over three decades Zoe Leonard has gained critical acclaim for her work. Rooted in photography, Leonard’s practice extends to spatial installation and sculpture. Her art is above all the result of a finely honed observation, in which the documentary approach of photography combines with the physical and bodily act of looking. Migration and displacement, gender and sexuality, mourning and loss, cultural history and the tensions between the natural world and human-built environments are recurring themes in her work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Mudam Archive

Zoe Leonard  in her solo exhibition premieres “Al río / To the River”, a large-scale photographic work begun in 2016 which takes the Rio Grande, as it is named in the United States, or Río Bravo, as it is named in Mexico, as its subject. Leonard photographed along the 2,000 kilometres where the river is used to demarcate the boundary between the United Mexican States and the United States of America, following the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico, where it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Epic in scale, “Al río / To the River” results from close observation of both the natural and built environments shaped by and surrounding the river; from desert and mountains to cities, towns and small villages where daily life unfolds in tandem with agriculture, commerce, industry, policing, and surveillance. Leonard’s photographs focus on the accumulation of infrastructure and other constructions built into and alongside the river to control the flow of water, the passage of goods, and the movement of people: dams, levees, roads, irrigation canals, bridges, pipelines, fences and checkpoints. ‘The shifting nature of a river – which floods periodically, changes course and carves new channels – is at odds with the political task it is asked to perform,’ says Leonard. The exhibition is structured in three parts, including a Prologue and a Coda. Each part engages with photographic language, moving fluidly from abstraction to documentary to digital surveillance imagery. Working with a hand-held analogue camera, Leonard takes an embodied position in relation to the river. While always subjective, her view onto the river is not fixed. Crossing frequently back and forth from one side of the river to another (and thus, from one country to another), Leonard refuses a one-sided point of view and instead engages a series of shifting, changing vantage points. The work takes shape in passages, sequences of photographs that impart a sense of movement and emphasise actions as they unfold through time. Rather than pointing to one ‘decisive moment’ or one fixed meaning, these arrangements allow the viewer to create meaning through their own close looking. The materiality of photographic process is foregrounded in Leonard’s prints. Each photograph is presented as a constructed image, taken from a certain point of view, and made material through processes of selection and printing. In “Al río / To the River”, Leonard pushes back against reductive depictions of the border in mass media, and instead considers a multiplicity of powers and influences. These include commercial and industrial interests, cultural histories and familial connections that span the river, as well as the animals and plants of the region, increasingly under pressure from drought and climate change or the often contradictory human constructions of the river itself, designated as a ‘wild and scenic’ waterway, a resource for water, and a political borderline.

Zoe Leonard was born in Liberty, New York, in 1961. At age sixteen, she dropped out of high school and began to practice art independently. Working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Leonard explores the themes of seriality, loss, and mortality as well as the physical and social changes of landscapes over time. Leonard was a vocal AIDS activist in New York during the 1980s and 1990s, an era that witnessed the loss of many in the art world. In “Strange Fruit (For David)” (1997), Leonard poignantly responds to this tragic history through an installation composed of dried fruit skins discarded seemingly at random on the gallery floor. The title of the work references the iconic anti-lynching song, written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and whose most famous recording features Billie Holiday, and the installation’s dedication to the artist David Wojnarowicz who died of AIDS in 1992 reveals this strange fruit to be haunting symbols of those victimized by the virus and society at large. The decaying fruit also alludes to the art-historical tradition of the vanitas still-life, a genre of painting in which ephemeral objects such as flowers, flickering candles, and skulls were depicted to symbolize human mortality. Yet, closer inspection reveals that Leonard has sutured the fruit back together with needle and thread, suggesting art’s potential to heal. This process of decay and repair is also explored in her installation “Mouth Open, Teeth Showing” (2001), which presents a standing array of 162 dolls that she had collected from yard sales and flea markets beginning in 1999. The artist was struck by the evidence of wear and alterations inscribed on the dolls, which she interpreted as the physical traces of their owner’s autobiographies and the passage of time. Like the skins in “Strange Fruit” the dolls are cast-off objects that have been recovered and transformed by the artist’s gesture. “Analogue” (1998–2007), a photographic series shot over a ten-year period, documents the facades of small storefronts and shop windows on New York’s Lower East Side, many of which would soon disappear in the wake of gentrification. Shot with a vintage Rolleiflex camera, the series creates a melancholic link between form and content as her analogue machine records a world that is becoming rapidly outmoded. Calling to mind Ed Ruscha’s “Building oEvery n the Sunset Strip” (1966), this series stands as a systematic archive of and elegiac monument to a lost and forgotten world.

Photo: Zoe Leonard , Photograph from “Al río / To the River” series, 2016-2022 , Approximately 500 gelatin silver prints, 40 C-prints and 40 inkjet prints | Exhibition Copy, Ed. of 3 + 1 AP, Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth, Production of “Al río / To the River” supported by Mudam Luxembourg, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth, © Zoe Leonard

Info: Curators: Suzanne Cotter and Christophe Gallois, Assistan Curagtor: Sarah Beaumont, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg, Duration: 26/2-6/6/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mudam.com