Louise Leathers

Louise Leathers
North Hollywood, California, USA

STATEMENT

I think of my work as a way to empower silent figures and to hold systems of power accountable. Through analog collages and assemblages, I hijack august representations, freeing them from the patriarchy they endure and inadvertently transmit. The image is usually that of a woman painted by a male artist, which allows me not only to change her narrative but also to reclaim the piece, continuing a movement of re-feminization in art history initiated by Sherrie Levine or Mary Beth Edelson before me. Religious magazines are one of my main sources of material, as I see every religion as a potential system of oppression. With it increasingly used as a political means in the United States, religious figures help me convey my sense of alarm. Proudly blasphemous, the results are often more joyful and lustful than the originals. My art therefore often takes a critical view of social, political, and cultural issues, resonating with contemporary concerns and the relentless news cycle familiar to the viewer. The work becomes cathartic for me, for the represented figure, and for the audience.

BIO

Louise Leathers is a French-born artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She obtained a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Paul Valéry Montpellier III in 2012. She began her career as a museum professional in Paris but it is only in 2016 that she started her own practice with collages. Appropriating the classical paintings she had studied and worked with for many years, she creates feminist analog works. Influenced by artists such as Sherrie Levine and the Guerrilla Girls, she seeks to contribute to an ongoing movement toward the re-feminization of art history. In 2017, she moved to Los Angeles and found an abundant new source of imagery in religious magazines. Having grown up Catholic, Louise Leathers has long perceived this religion as a system of oppression, but the internal American fight with the temptation of theocracy only comforted her in her radical anti-religious views. She began to develop new provocative and blasphemous series, freeing her characters from dogma. While the Mary series reimagines scenes of the Nativity, transforming the figure of Jesus into piles of sex toys and contraceptives of all kinds, her more recent assemblages use these figures to interrogate and challenge contemporary political power structures. Her work can now be found in private collections in Europe.collections in Europe.

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