BIO
Leah Evans is an emerging artist based in Lethbridge Alberta. She grew up in small towns across Alberta, with most of her early childhood spent in Rimbey and later years primarily in Drayton Valley. The aesthetics and social forms of these environments play a role in her paintings that focus on memory and early childhood experience. Currently, Leah is working towards a BFA in Art at the University of Lethbridge. She is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the Roloff Beny Foundation Award in Photographic Art and the Gushul Studio Artist Residency Prize.
Artist Statement
In my practice one topic that I am currently exploring is femininity, branching off from my personal experience as a young woman. Topics such as ‘female rage’ and women’s mental health are concerns of my work that reference a broad scope of experience, including sources from real life as well as media and literature. In my painting, Shower (2023), I depict two female figures showering and menstruating, and question (or call to attention) the history of representing women in art and the viewers’ voyeuristic gaze. This painting conveys for me a feeling of inner turmoil. Could womanhood be considered as the death of childhood?
Exploring this question, I am painting referencing snapshots taken from Google street view of my childhood home and street. Pictorial representations merge with visuals from memory. The images are threatened by the orange ‘nuclear’ sky which depicts a moment before the inescapable desecration to the alluded child and the safety of their familiar surroundings.
As a painter, my art often references family albums or photographs which I take myself - the former being the case with my most recently completed series, Gone Creatures (2022). With these paintings I first attempt to play with this space that exists between memory and pictorial representation, questioning the value and legitimacy of both in relation to one another. The work presents a reflection on a child’s interpretation of their surroundings, with the proximity and omnipotence of parental figures and threatening creatures acting to underscore the uncertainties of childhood and its distresses and fears.
