Website: https://www.leonardreidelbach.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justhavefunandbeyrself/
Artist Bio
Leonard Reidelbach (b. Richmond, VA) is a San Francisco based artist working with print and installation. He makes narrative figurative work that explores visibility and embodiment through a trans perspective, often using silkscreen to produce paintings and site responsive sculptures.
His work has been shown in the Bay at venues including ICA San Francisco, Berkeley Art Center, and CUBE Space, and he has completed residencies and fellowships at Kala Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, and Recology in San Francisco. In addition to his studio practice, he taught courses at California College of the Arts and UC Davis, and he organized a free to the community printshop with Youth Art Exchange. These projects reflect his interest in making print media more accessible and collaborative. Leonard is currently a Visual Arts Fellow in Printmaking at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.
Artist Statement
My work opposes the legislature's strategy to threaten trans rights, pushing a fascist agenda stripping everyone's privacy and autonomy. The media intentionally discards narratives of nuance and pleasure-qualities that define humanity. When humanity is stripped, violence is more acceptable.
I make serigraphs that build nonlinear narratives from the tension between viewer and subject and architectural sculptures that control the viewer’s access and perception of embodiment so the audience must become an active participant in looking. I am interested in surveillance culture, strategies of performance and safety, and the liberalization of trans life in America. Prints generate variations in matrixes that fracture and expand the possibilities of a single moment. Through a maximalist use of color and materials like velvet, plastic, latex, and silk, I embrace pleasure over a desire to be
legible.
By controlling the viewer’s access and perception of embodiment, I invite the audience to consider the mechanisms of identity, transformation, and experience. New ways of seeing and being are a way to invite a more welcoming future. Not only for transexuals, but for all of us as we navigate a global shift in privacy, information, and access to truth as a collective.
Work Statement
These paintings began at Headlands Center for the Arts, where I was thinking about windows, access, visibility, fog, stolen land, genocide, wealth, duck hunting, and the lingering ghosts of gay soldiers. These things did not resolve into a story. They accumulated as a kind of atmosphere.
I built the paintings through related screen-printed matrices on silk, sometimes printing a fiber etch into the surface to remove material and create texture and translucency. Fabric dye moves through the images by hand application. The silk catches and releases light, carrying associations of wealth, intimacy, spectacle, and concealment.
Ghosts of military soldiers move through these paintings, acting out a torrid love affair and pushing one another through windows. Architecture becomes bodily: a threshold, a frame, an opening, a place of passage or exclusion. The figures hover between intimacy and violence, history, and fantasy.
I was thinking about militarization and empire, the inherited language of Western painting, and the emotional residue of violence. I was also thinking about the decoy: something made to attract the eye, manipulate attention, and guide a body toward capture. The paintings hold these thoughts alongside grief for the world, for histories that persist, and for the intimate violences that echo through personal life
defenestration: brace
Silkscreen print, devore, dye on satin stretched over wood
40” x 56”
2024
$8000
defenestration: pull
Silkscreen print, devore, dye on satin stretched over wood
40” x 45”
2024
$6000
defenestration: mass
Silkscreen print, devore, dye on satin stretched over wood
40” x 26”
2024
$4000
defenestration: hinge
Silkscreen print, devore, dye on satin stretched over wood
40” x 28”
2024
$4000