Leah Wilson
Tropes
June 30 – August 29, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Friday, July 24 at noon
Opening July 3, from 5:30pm – 8pm July 24
110 West Broadway
Eugene, OR 97401
541-344-3482
Leah Wilson’s solo exhibition of recent work titled, Tropes will be seen at DIVA’s main gallery in Eugene, OR. The exhibition opens June 30 and runs through August 29, 2009 with a reception for the artist Friday, July 3rd from 5:30pm to 9pm during Eugene’s First Friday Art Walk.
Today every major river in Oregon violates water quality standards. Most of the pollution in Oregon’s rivers comes from urban and agricultural runoff. It is easily overlooked as it is not readily visible and the rivers maintain the illusion of health.
In this premier Oregon exhibition of Wilson’s work, she has created groups of paintings based on debris she has found in the rivers of Oregon and California. The waters claim the debris as their own, slowly changing it over time as if to appear part of the rivers themselves. Wilson views debris as a bridge between the natural wild areas of rivers and ourselves, markers that we have been here, leaving bits and pieces of our passing behind. She looks for the things that usually go unnoticed, the small things and the slowly changing things. She is drawn to the distortions created by the river on the debris and of our own perceptions of ourselves and the rivers.
Wilson received her M.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. Her penchant for traveling the world via whitewater kayak has brought her to many countries including New Zealand, Panama and Costa Rica. Guiding and teaching whitewater kayaking has allowed her to spend prolonged periods of time in a boat studying the subtleties of rivers. Wilson’s paintings have been exhibited at Julie Baker Fine Art in Nevada City, CA and featured at the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California, Los Medanos College Art Gallery in Pittsburg, California and the Oakland Art Gallery in Oakland, California. Her work is in the collections of eBay, Inc., Adobe Systems, Inc., Namco Inc., as well as other corporate and private collections, and her photography has been featured in Common Ground magazine. She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon.
