Leslie Shows

By: Joseph Jacobs

February 2007

Leslie Shows is the youngest of our four artists, just now receiving her MFA from the California

"View from the West of High-Viscosity Lithic Form, with Carbon Freeze," 2006, mixed media.

College of the Arts. But she’s precocious, already finding a mature artistic voice and being included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “2006 SECA Art Award” exhibition, which featured up-and-coming Bay Area artists. Her large paintings on wood panel present unpopulated, lifeless landscapes blighted by industry. Her rainbows are greasy and look like an oil slick, while her hazy skies appear filled with pollutants. “Glaciers, calcified mining ruins and rainy, rebar-strewn lots were my playgrounds growing up in Alaska,” she explains.

Her images are hardly depictions of any real world. Instead they conjure up a timeless end-of-the-world scenario, a permanent state of endless ruin. And yet, the artist’s Wayne Thiebaud–like confectionary colors and her playful use of collage deftly woven into the paint lend these landscapes a beguiling beauty, paradoxically suggesting that the destruction can lead to a new, even more beautiful, if quite strange, planet.