Leslie Shows

Leslie Shows is a Los Angeles-based artist whose mixed media works connect earth processes with painting and psychological processes. Their luminous, almost-recognizable surfaces, often incorporating glass, metal, sand or ink, invite an embodied experience of perceptual suspension, acting as lenses through which to see what surrounds us. Previous series of work have depicted pyrite, sculptural and industrial molds and their metaphors, panoramic abstractions connecting landscape with the passage of thought, elegiac ocean imagery, and desert-scapes that engage painterly illusion and the material and compositional ruptures of painting’s history. Her solo exhibitions include the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter & McBean Gallery and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Shows has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Anchorage Museum, and Brazil’s Mercosul Biennial. She has received several fellowships and residencies including an Artadia Award and the Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Award.