Transitory Space: Contradictions & Consciousness Scattered Throughout The Environment

How does human existence serve to continually alter our environment? Are we destroying the very ground we require to survive? The “Transitory Space” series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions, and a continual human imprint. It articulates fluctuations in the photographic image and captures movements through time, perception, and space.

The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate, overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is visible.
Peter Mattiessen from The Snow Leopard

#1

Humans leave traces and artifacts of our consciousness everywhere in our environment.

#2

Contradictory realities can be found co-existing wherever we look.

#3

They’re in what we choose to think, what we choose to believe, and how we choose to act. And, they can be found in what we choose to observe.

#4

When I look back on a moment, it’s full of impressions — multiple exposures capture this.

#5

I make multiple exposures on specific frames in the camera, which allows me to display a more complete correlation of experiences that a single exposure just misses.

#6

Every moment captured on film is over as soon as the shutter clicks, recording the ephemeral. Yet, in reality, there is always a visual cacophony of experience.

#7

We are always living in many realities at once. Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world more accurately.

#8

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering.

#9

They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility.

#10

They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.

Leah Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for graduate study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

In 2019, Oates had work shown in the REVEAL Art Fair in Saratoga Springs, NY with Susan Eley Fine Art and in Toronto 2019 a solo show at Black Cat Artspace and group shows at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Grow Op 2019, Propeller Gallery, Xpose 2019 at the Papermill Gallery, Arta Gallery, Neilson Park Creative Centre, Connections Gallery and the 2019 SNAP Photography Auction at the Arcadian Court. Oates has a solo show in spring 2020 at Wychwood Barns Community Gallery in Toronto.

In 2018–2019, Oates had press in Art Toronto, Junto Magazine, Magazine 43, Underexposed Magazine, Ruminate Journal, Mud Season Review, dArt Magazine, The Tulane Review, The Six Hundred JournalBlue Mesa Review, Friends of the Artist, GASHER Journal, Flumes Literary Journal and the 805 Lit + Art Journal.