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| Personal Commission, "A dream into the Real...", 2008 |
Leigh Ledare
(1976)
Leigh Ledare (b. 1976, Seattle, Washington) is a fine art photographer who, "uses photography and video to document his highly eroticized relationship with his mother."
In 2009, Ledare was included in an exhibition "Ca Me Touche," curated by Nan Goldin in Arles France as part of the annual Rencontres d'Arles photography festival. Writing in the New York Times, Robert Smith said that Ledare is "taking us deep into the darkness and torment that drive many artists." In the series "Personal Commissions" Ledare "answered personal ads from women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their apartments, in a scenario of their choosing."
Working with photography, archives, film and text, the focus of Ledare’s practice lies in an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of identity but at the level of our projected desires, motivations and aspirations. These inter-relational drives often impose irreconcilable demands on the individual. His work explores this position of ambivalence as it relates to agency, representation, self-presentation, and issues produced by the enactment of this work in the context of the real world.
Leigh Ledare received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. Ledare will have major solo exhibitions this year at WIELS, Brussels, (2012). Solo exhibitions include; The Box, Los Angles (2012); An Invitation Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2012); The Confectioner’s Confectioner,Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2010); Double Bind, The Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Pretend You’re Actually Alive, Les Rencontres de Arles, Arles (2009); Swiss Institute New York (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); International Center of Photography, New York (2008); You Are Nothing To ME. You Are Like Air, Rivington Arms Gallery (2008) . Group exhibitions include; Collaborations & Interventions, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain (2012); How Soon is Now, The Garage CCC, Moscow Russia, Curated by Beatrix Ruf, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno (2010); Greater New York 2010, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Neville Wakefield and Connie Butler, P.S. 1 MoMA, New York (2010);Prague Biennale (2009)
Leigh Ledare lives and works in New York City.
http://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/leigh-ledare/
Working with photography, archives, film and text, the focus of Ledare’s practice lies in an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of identity but at the level of our projected desires, motivations and aspirations. These inter-relational drives often impose irreconcilable demands on the individual. His work explores this position of ambivalence as it relates to agency, representation, self-presentation, and issues produced by the enactment of this work in the context of the real world.
Leigh Ledare received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. Ledare will have major solo exhibitions this year at WIELS, Brussels, (2012). Solo exhibitions include; The Box, Los Angles (2012); An Invitation Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2012); The Confectioner’s Confectioner,Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2010); Double Bind, The Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Pretend You’re Actually Alive, Les Rencontres de Arles, Arles (2009); Swiss Institute New York (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); International Center of Photography, New York (2008); You Are Nothing To ME. You Are Like Air, Rivington Arms Gallery (2008) . Group exhibitions include; Collaborations & Interventions, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain (2012); How Soon is Now, The Garage CCC, Moscow Russia, Curated by Beatrix Ruf, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno (2010); Greater New York 2010, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Neville Wakefield and Connie Butler, P.S. 1 MoMA, New York (2010);Prague Biennale (2009)
Leigh Ledare lives and works in New York City.
http://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/leigh-ledare/
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| Leigh Ledare with his mother |
Works
Mom Spread With Lamp (2000)
Exhibitions
2009: "Ca me touche", curated by Nan Goldin, Les Rencontres d'Arles, France.
Mom Spread With Lamp (2000)
Exhibitions
2009: "Ca me touche", curated by Nan Goldin, Les Rencontres d'Arles, France.
2010: Nominated and exhibited at the Recontres d'Arles Discovery Award, France.
2012: Wiels Contemporary Art Center, in Brussels
2013: Kunsthal Charlottenborg, in Copenhague
2012: Wiels Contemporary Art Center, in Brussels
2013: Kunsthal Charlottenborg, in Copenhague
S Magazine Feature Interview, September
"Artist Profile", Rodeo Magazine, October
"Portfolio of Personal Commissions", The Journal Magazine, September
Best in Show featured review of show at Roth,Village Voice, May
2007
Interview in ANP Quarterly #9, Winter Edition, edited by Ed Templeton and Aaron Rose
New York Magazine review of show at Cohan and Leslie
2006
Image of Larry Clark for Cover of ANP Quarterly #4
"Night Wolves, Moscow motorcycle gang",Tokion Magazine
2005
Strange Place, Noun Trilogy Art Anthology, Volume One, Ten page arrangement of Photographs made in Russia
2003
Artist profile, Dutch Magazine
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| Mom in New Home, 2007 |
Leigh Ledare
Confession, amateur porn, vulnerablility and a complicated mother-son relationship
Leigh Ledare, Me and Mom in Photobooth (2007)
A woman with dyed red hair romps on the bed in sheer black lingerie, licking her lips and spreading her legs unabashedly for the camera. The images resemble profile pictures on a swinger’s website, or an amateur porn collaboration between a middle-aged divorcee and her new boyfriend. But in fact, it’s her son behind the camera. The question is whether there’s anything left to discuss beyond the obvious broken taboo and blatant manifestation of Oedipal complex, or whether we dismiss this as exploitation, sensationalism, or a severe case of over-sharing.
Yet what kept me from turning away from Leigh Ledare’s images is how capable the artist is of catching his mother in even more intimate and vulnerable positions, with her clothes on. The photographs, text and ephemera that comprise the artist book and eponymous exhibition ‘Pretend You’re Actually Alive’ (2008) and the exhibition ‘You Are Nothing to Me. You Are Like Air.’ (2008) contextualize and complicate the bracing nudity with an even more brutal and personal narrative. In the book, snapshots of Ledare’s mother having sex with one of her lovers are set off by poignant portraits of her sitting dourly on the sofa with her hand in a medical brace, or with her eyes closed, posing as a corpse. For every nude photograph, there is another, more revealing document: Ledare’s grandmother in the hospital before her death, family snapshots of the artist as a teenager, along with the artist’s typed diary entries and scribbled notes.
The book forms a complicated portrait of Ledare’s mother, Tina Peterson, as a person and her persona, as well as her son’s fraught role as her portraitist. We see Peterson as a young ballet prodigy who was once featured in Seventeenmagazine, as well as the ageing mother who has quit multiple jobs, perpetrated credit card fraud, and seeks wealthy benefactors through the personal ads. But Ledare’s photos also sensitively address her more common maternal vulnerabilities, in particular her obsession with the trappings of her former glamour. Ledare photographs Peterson at home, lying naked in front of a stack of several large cardboard boxes all labelled ‘vintage shoes’. In a hand-written note at the end of the book she itemizes her son’s inheritance, which is to include her ‘antique umbrellas’, ‘collectible tea sets’ and ‘cookie business plans’. Such documents expose the life of unrealistic aspirations and unfulfilled ambitions that may have brought Peterson to adopt this persona. But they also suggest what might have led her son to introduce the camera into the dynamic.
But Ledare also makes a conscious effort to counter his position as the photographer with that of the subject. In his series ‘Personal Commissions’ (2008), he answered personal ads from women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their apartments, in a scenario of their choosing. Displayed as a stack of framed portraits leaning against the wall, the images show him posing nude wearing fishnet stockings on his face or surrounded by a collection of stuffed teddy bears. But the most telling detail is perhaps the artist’s moustache – on a handsome young art school graduate, the bushy moustache seems to function as a parodic disguise, disturbing the series’ ostensible earnestness. For me, the question of the moustache inflects the artist’s whole project: how self-conscious, how ironic is this?
Indeed, Ledare’s work reveals signs that the relationship between mother and son is also one of professional complicity. In an interview printed on the book’s cover, Peterson defines herself as the ‘model’ who is ‘working her butt off’. At the same time, photo-booth strips of Ledare and his mother mugging for the camera and making out like teenagers provide glimpses of the pair as willing co-conspirators. Such insertions create a layer of artifice that unsettles the raw, confessional mode that Ledare seems to be emulating. His predecessors in the field, like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, have also confronted sexual taboos and flirted with pornography, or, as with Richard Billingham’s documentary images of his family, raised the stakes of familial intimacy and revelation. Despite their explicitness, Ledare’s photographs are neither bluntly documentary nor achingly sincere, but are knowingly mediated through the languages and tropes of contemporary art. His idiom is that of an artist who has already absorbed the romanticization of these previous projects and is looking for way to further complicate the relationship of artist and muse.
In this way, Ledare’s work might signal a shift in this kind of expressionist, confessional tradition of photography. In a culture where candid personal photographs litter the Internet and people willingly use reality TV shows to expose their personal baggage, Ledare is aware that any attempt at authenticity will already be polluted. Maybe the confessional can no longer be confronted head-on, but rather with a sidelong glance, or with a knowing look out the corner of one’s eye. But Ledare’s gazes are no less poignant or penetrating because of it.
Christy Lange
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/leigh_ledare/
Leigh Ledare: My Mom's Crotch
Unsettlingly intimate photographs at Andrew Roth
Unsettlingly intimate photographs at Andrew Roth
By R. C. Baker
Tuesday, May 6 2008
Not exactly the Joffrey: Ledare's 2002 Mother and Catch 22
(the nickname of one of Tina's lovers)
Details
Leigh Ledare: 'Pretend You're Actually Alive'
Andrew Roth 160A East 70th Street Through June 14
Imagine that in 1966, long before you were born, your mom, a 16-year-old beauty named Tina, posed forSeventeen magazine, her slightly large nose emphasizing her fawn-like blue eyes and swooping russet curls, her body lithe under pink angora. She was training to be a ballerina, and her porcelain skin was as ethereal as her performances with the Joffrey. Fast-forward 25 years: In a snapshot, Mom is helping you with your tie before a Sweet 15 dance, her red hair flaming a few degrees beyond what nature granted. A formal shot from later in the evening captures your date—a cute girl, though not a stunner like Mom, even if her hair is a radiant match to the maternal thatch. By 2003, Tina's ballet career has devolved into Seattle Weekly personal ads: "EXOTIC DANCER—Not kidding! Beautiful, glamorous, sexy, intelligent & talented former ballerina & serious artist . . . who excels at fantasy and reality . . . seeks wealthy husband."
This decline has been documented in the pictures that Leigh Ledare has taken of his mother, her lovers, himself, and other family members over the past decade. Mom Spread With Lamp (2000) doesn't beat around the bush—it's Tina, on a bed, dramatically lit, her naked, depilated crotch thrust at the viewer, her stomach and thighs taut from strip-club exertions. In Mom After the Accident (2005), she's full-frontal again, a post-car-crash neck brace above heavier breasts, her hips wider, her legs doughier, her regal countenance set off against a textured ceiling glowing as orange as a tropical sunset, her hair still blazing. Leigh's typed reminiscences from seventh grade include a rare reference to Dad: "in his tighty whiteys on these green couch cushions on the laundry room floor . . . Mom thinks he's trying to make her look bad, like she married a loser." He recalls his mother after a shower, lying down near him: "The mound of red hair at her crotch is starting to dry and get fluffy." A haunting color portrait of Tina from 2007, her closed eyes as serene as a death mask, contrasts with four 2008 photo-booth strips of mother and son mugging and staging kisses. This mix of ephemera and unsettling photographic fact coalesces into a particularly graphic novel of the mind, about one family that's definitely unhappy (or not) in its very own way.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-05-06/art/leigh-ledare-my-mom-s-crotch/
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Leigh Ledare
Private function
Wednesday, 21 de april 2010
These days there are few taboo subjects that haven’t been tackled by a photographer, and it takes something very unexpected to genuinely raise eyebrows. At least year’s Recontre d’Arles photography festival in the South of France, guest of honour and long-time provocateur Nan Goldin invited a group of talented photographers, some established and some emerging, to show their work in one of the main exhibition halls. After the opening week, one young photographer’s name was on everyone’s lips: Leigh Ledare
His exhibition there, currently on show in expanded form at the Pilar Corrias gallery in London, was an extraordinary exploration of his decidedly ambiguous relationship with his mother, and the conflicting desires faced by a young man and an aging woman. Brutally intimate, it featured a mix of poignant portraits, personal, often troubling letters between mother and son, and explicit shots of his mother involved in sexual acts with male prostitutes. For a son to witness his mother involved in such scenes is one thing, but to be able to coolly document them and realise a show based around them was something few, if any, were prepared for. His mother, a former model and professional ballerina, appears to have serious trouble reconciling herself with her increasing age and declining appeal to the opposite sex, actively going out of her way to be provocative and sexual, drawing Ledare into her subversive schemes. These images aren’t deliberately sensationalist though, and once you can get beyond the initial shock, Ledare’s work explores some serious, fundamental issues. He looks at what makes us who we are; our desires, aspirations and needs; primal urges which are often loaded with ethical and psychological conflict. The hand-written ‘Girls I Wanted To Do’ list, which include his mum and his then-girlfriend’s sister alongside more obvious objects of teenage lust, listed alongside heroes from his childhood, is a great, poignant illustration of the complicated urges and aspirations of adolescence. All of us have ideas of who we'd like to be and how we want to appear, but few have delved this deeply into the murkier parts of the psyche. The viewer wonders who this woman is, and who the photographer is that can put himself through this. Its raw therapy and role-play through photography in a way that Cindy Sherman never dreamed of, and the body of work as a whole is something very brave and unprecedented.
Perhaps unfortunately for him, Ledare was anointed the successor to Goldin’s throne after his triumph at Arles. But his work is very different to hers, and the fearless way he explores the themes he does set him apart from Goldin, who is more of a documentarian. Ledare has also been working on a series of self portraits which continue his exploration of identity and the role of photographer and model. Answering personal ads which reminded him of his mothers’ view of herself, he paid these women to photograph him at their homes, in scenarios of their choice. He also invited certain art collectors to photograph him within the context of their art collections, and both these series mix together to further blur our idea of who this complex, unsettling photographer is.
