Research: Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard is an American artist working mainly with sculpture and photography. Based in New York, her work explores themes such as loss, the passing of time, displacement and repetition.

For her 1995 work Strange Fruit, in response to the death of a close friend, she sewed the skins of fruit such as oranges, lemons and grapefruit together with wire, thread and zips, in a nod to vanitas still life paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries, suggesting the fleeting and finite nature of life. The work evolves and decays as time passes until eventually it is gone, a theme which I am very interested in and which is reflected in my work depicting the imprints left by human activity on grass.

She continues her interest in the passage of time in her series Analogue, this time investigating the disappearing landscape of 20th century urban life with photographs of shop fronts, taken on a vintage 1940s Rollaiflex camera to reflect the nature of obsolescence in an increasingly globalised economy. Tracing the circulation of recycled merchandise, Leonard visited roadside markets in locations such as Cuba, Africa and the Middle East and presented the resulting images in a series of repetitive grids.

For her 2008 work You See I Am Here After All, she takes a different view on the passage of time, this time presenting thousands of postcards she has collected of Niagara Falls, dating from the early 1900s to the 1050s. This work is a commentary on the commoditising of nature by the tourist industry, showing how repetitive depictions of famous landmarks were used by the industry to infiltrate iconic symbols from nature into mass culture, and on the generic depictions of the picturesque.