Zoe Leach
Gallery Opening: October 5 • 3-5pm
The Radiant Glory of the Anthropocene explores the 6th mass extinction through the lens of the human experience of joy and anguish. Mass extinction is an abstract concept that can only be understood with human intellect rather than direct experience. This has no bearing on the reality of the situation. However, it does mean that without seeking out the information and contemplating it, we can live in a totally human-created, human-centric environment that has no relation to the ecology that was destroyed in order for that environment to exist. Our direct experience can be void of the truth of ecological destruction and mass extinction.
The work of the Radiant Glory of the Anthropocene invites viewers to contemplate the cost and contradiction of modern industrial global civilization. The skulls embody the human experience of joy and transcendence while simultaneously perpetrating unseen destruction.
The skulls of primates and hominid cousins lend a specific consideration of our “human” origins and mammal reality. This includes the raw, primal physical reality as well as awesome human intellectual achievement. The complex truth encompasses both sides of the duality.
Zoe Lavatelli Leach was born in 1985 and was immersed in art from a young age as she grew up in a family of artists in Buffalo, NY. She currently resides in Lawrence, New Jersey, and uses oil paint, watercolor, and mixed media on canvas and paper. Lavatelli obtained a BFA from The Cooper Union, and has studied various disciplines outside the art field, which inform her artwork. The study and practice of Buddhism has been particularly influential, with its focus on existential questions, and informs both the content and the painting process itself. Her studio work has explored figuration and abstraction over the years, but has a new found energy and velocity with the current emergent theme of animal skulls merging with abstraction.
