the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck
––
Maxwell Graham Gallery is honored to present Zoe Leonard’s Display. The exhibition consists of a new body of work by the artist;
although the photographs were taken between 1990 and 1994, Leonard only realized them as artworks this year. The tragedy of the
photographs is their continued relevance.
These are the first works made by Leonard after Al río / To the River, 2016-2022, a project comprising nearly 500 photographs taken
along the 1,200 mile stretch of the Rio Grande / Río Bravo river, which is used to demarcate the international boundary between
Mexico and the United States. Leonard’s artwork testimonies a multitude of dimensions within the borderlands; nature’s contested
resilience, arrests, helicopters overhead, checkpoints viewed remotely on a laptop screen, and countless physical structures from white
picket fences to barbed wire concrete blockades intervening on the earth.
The new exhibition Display returns to the historical roots of our predilection towards violence and militarization. The photographed
objects span from 300 BC to 1600. Display recalls previous bodies of work made by Leonard which also studied historic objects on
display in museums including chastity belts, anatomical models, wigs, the preserved head of a bearded woman. Those objects attested
to a legacy of homophobia and misogyny evolving into the brutality of the AIDS crisis; the objects in Display attest to the entrenched
conditions of patriarchal and territorial barbarity still spilling blood into the present.
