female subjectivity that explore the joys and
artistic vision as she utilizes autobiography to
pains of domestic intimacies. This “intimate
explore the layered twists of intimate desires,
documentary approach” provides multi-layered
daily life, and painful loss. In this way, Leonard
studies of the social, emotional, and sensual
consistently explores feminist concerns about
pulls and pushes of motherhood and family life.
embodiment, power, desire, and inequality.
Relentlessly self-reflexive, Leonard explores the
Newspaper Diary pushes the boundaries
politics of the private sphere through close-up
of Leonard’s previous interests in public
images of bodies and faces that accompany
and private spheres. The tug and pull of
written memories of hopes, struggles, and
temporalities locates the immediacy of news
disappointments. In the past decade, Leonard’s
events within a historical gaze that contrasts
work has increasingly moved towards
ephemerality with durability. At the same time,
explorations of the intersections of memoir and
color, composition, and other aesthetic features
Rather than attempt to document “the real,”
public histories. She uses collages of drawings,
reveal historical influences on contemporary
Leonard’s trompe-l’oeil pictures re-present
photographs, and print material to visualize a
ways of seeing. The swirls of smoky red and
reproductions, facsimiles, and copies. Visual
fragmented and non-linear family history that
orange colors in a 2010 news photo of a fire
witnessing in Joanne Leonard’s world, then, is
is anything but singular or private. Visually
in northern Arizona parallel those in J. M. W.
always a mediated experience in which history
lyrical, Leonard’s art typically has an edge that
Turner’s famous 1835 painting The Burning of
and the present do not so much clash
catches your breath. Memory is crucial to her
the House of Lords and Commons. (p. 11)
as mingle.
fig. 3
JOANNE LEONARD
5