artiststatement

When you place boundaries around an object or shape, you create a world within a world. Enclosure doesn‘t only limit or prevent escape; it allows something new to happen within that space. And the interior space is not necessarily lesser than what surrounds it.

These works - paintings, boxes & photographs - all explore the paradox of enclosure: the canvas surface is broken up through numerous color blocks and collaged elements, each color or image allowed fullness while adding to the rhythm of the greater painting. The photographs and boxes allow a voyeuristic escape into a dream – a small, private place that cannot fully be shared. Adding an element of containment and reduced scale to a common image, such as a bed, reveals how privacy and intimacy are held in tension with space and time. The stereoscopic, or 3D effect in the photos helps bring the small spaces alive.

BIO
I exhibited for nine years in the Washington, DC metro area before moving to the Shenandoah Valley in 2005. I earned a BFA in Painting from Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, where I grew up. Abstract painter Joyce McCarten has been my painting mentor, and at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC, I took post-graduate work with fellow Alabama native Bill Christenberry and collage guru Mindy Weisel. British colourist Richard Kenton Webb greatly influenced my painting palette. I currently live in Staunton, Virginia with my husband the nearly famous writer and our son the international force of nature.

galleries:

boxes

art ideas:

•Peter Lanyon
•Alexander Calder & Calder’s Circus
•Arthur Ganson’s Machines
•Joseph Cornell Boxes
•Cabaret Mechanical Theatre (UK)
•art is dangerous
•jamey grimes - sculpture
•amy pirkle - book arts
•Leslie Chisholm - jewelry

artist statement

leslie banta