Joanne Leonard is an artist who has always offered a glimpse into the room, cataloguing the small details, the countertop, toys strewn about the floor, a lover asleep on the bed, the dream of a window, and the house not quite ready for company. Both the act of photographing and the resulting images of this inner world serve as record of the human trace and the value of our own human experiences. Her photographs are profoundly personal and conversely startling in their entirety. I first met Joanne Leonard in the 1980s. I was her student at the University of Michigan, just beginning to explore my own voice as a young woman and an artist. She was perhaps the first person I’d ever known and the only art professor at the time (most were men) that spoke of empowerment, feminism, the strength and potential impact of our own stories, ideas, and imaginations. It wasn’t until years later that I recognized her tremendous influence on my own artistic practice. I had carried her with me. She taught me that value is inherent in one’s life and work, but it is also dependent on a constant vigil and endurance…a commitment to the process of becoming. Joanne Leonard’s work has never been static or complacent, rather in a state of response. Her own narratives and the reign of the world’s events are in overlay, deeply relevant to the collective shifts of society.
Leonard’s use of collage reiterates this back and forth between public and private, past and present, real and imagined. The materiality of her photographic collages juxtaposes the flat, two-dimensional surface with the luridness of unexpected combinations. A hint of color, texture, pattern, a passage of text ignites the images, alluding to that place of seismic instability, where all breaks away. In Newspaper Diary, her exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities, Leonard continues the conversation. The significance of our books and correspondence, our histories, our love letters, our rituals are in doubt. These brave new works initially reside in the present. They are modern and unaffected, somehow reassuring. We can almost picture the artist herself drinking her coffee, reading the Times, placing cuttings of the newspaper against the pages of her favorite art book. Before long, through a carefully considered sleight of hand, these trompe-l’oeil photographs defy all presumptions and constructs of time, upending any notion we have about history and our place in it, or some record left for posterity’s sake. These compositions exist only in the photographs; they are props, mis-enscènes. And in this discovery comes the wrenching acceptance of what we desperately try to save, and what we inevitably lose in the midst of it all.
The works in Newspaper Diary are highly complex conceptually. Each photograph captures the translation from idea to volition. The gravity of the book, the image, and the paper succumb to the impermanence of things. As a final record, the photographs themselves become object. The uncanny relationship between visual representations decades apart suggests that our uniqueness is more likely and predictable than we think, like a roll of sixes in a game of dice, or the Jack of Spades in a deck of cards… noteworthy, but not beyond replication. We live in a world full of black holes, tweets and texts, and the big bang. Perhaps, in some alternate universe there exists another version of us, with a different end. Newspaper Diary offered no absolutes but some measure alluding to continuity… what came before, “it is what it is” and a life after this one. Joanne Leonard matter-of-factly catalogs this timeline, capturing for a moment the poignant immediacy of the everyday, the harsh realities of the times in which we live, and the inevitability of a tomorrow that may not remember what mattered. Yet, in the deliberateness of these photographs that are already recollections, Leonard also embraces humanity and a certain resilience.
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