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Leah Oates is an old-school New Englander. Born in Boston MA, and reared first in Cambridge, then in the small town of Sanford, Maine, the current Brooklyn - based photographer credits her style and sensibilities and strong reverence for nature to her mostly rural upbringing. Her mother-s ancestors in Maine and Massachusetts can be traced back to the early 1600-s, where they were sea captains, and fought in the Revolutionary War. This rich colonial heritage has definitely infiltrated her stylish work with a kind of East-coast discernment, as she recycles and layers images of dilapidated structures and industrial wastelands with the natural beauty she was surrounded by as a child, to produce something entirely new and noteworthy. Seeing beauty where others may not, she manages to create surprising and engaging art from unremarkable subject matter.

Born into a family of artists including her mother, brother, an aunt and uncle, Oates was immersed in art and culture from early childhood on, and her interest in that world never wavered. Oates remembers, -My mom being a painter loved all things art-related, and she always brought my brother and I to museums, galleries, film festivals and street performances in Harvard Square. I was exposed to a lot of visual art, theatre, dance, and live music. We often went to museums to see the Old Masters and European painters like Caravaggio, Cezanne, Corbett, Rembrandt, Goya and Velasquez, and modern painters too, but rarely contemporary artists. I think this was a very good foundation.-

Growing up in Cambridge opened up many doors for the young Leah.  At seven years old she received a full scholarship to study dance at the Cambridge School of Ballet. -The teachers were Russian and British, and we studied every day after school for hours, and on weekends too. I loved it, as it was full of wonderful music, with magical ideas and costumes. I lost interest in dance though when I was thirteen, as the level of commitment at the time was too intense for me as a teenager. That was when my focus shifted to visual arts.- The move to Maine that followed brought about the appreciation for nature that is still so prevalent in her photography, and is the mainstay of her professional work.

Oates is well-known for her images that encapsulate the essence of the rural countryside - the meandering streams, massive trees and cloud-strewn skies that she manipulates and juxtaposes with abandoned structures, trash heaps and the chaos of human impact. Capturing and connecting naturally beautiful organic images with the taint of an apathetic society creates the complex and intriguing content of her expressive images that are both energetic and serene, eliciting questions about meaning, impact, and significance. Her renowned work has been shown in galleries across the country, and is featured in many public collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Brooklyn Museum, The British Library, The Walker Art Center Libraries, The Smithsonian Libraries, and the Franklin Furnace Archive at the Museum of Modern Art.

Beauty is a word Oates uses often when talking about her muse, Mother Nature. Bringing attention to mankind-s often destructive behavior in that realm and the ensuing dire consequences seems to be a motivating factor in her work. As she explains -Beauty is transformative, and elicits so many emotions from us, makes life so much better, and elevates us.  I see beauty even in the seemingly "ugly," as a keyhole into our true reality without fear, assumptions, or a need for control. It-s all there, all the time, and one just has to turn ones focus towards it. I'd like viewers who interact with my work to see the beauty everywhere, all the time, and how urban and natural environments relate to each other. Both have this incredible creative energy from different sources.-

Oates obviously has a profound respect for nature, and feels very connected to it. Certainly, having uncles that worked for the Environmental Protection Agency didn-t hurt, but her connection to the great outdoors seems more innate. From her perspective, -How we view and treat nature is a reflection of our personal inner world, as we are as much a part of nature as a tree or a rock. Where I grew up in Maine it was both rural and industrial and the landscape in Maine is truly American and off the grid, which still influences my work. It is wild, sublime and has unique energy which I just love and respond to.-

In this age of Instagram, it is hard to stand out as a photographer, since nearly everyone has a camera phone in their pocket.  Yet Oates, who still uses a film camera and develops her own work in the darkroom, not only has a great eye for composition, but also has some unique tricks to create her unusual and complex images. Shooting multiple exposures and using multiple cameras in a single shoot, then layering image upon image is part of her technique that creates her unpredictable and eloquent photos.  Utilizing infra-red photography gives many images a ghost-like appearance, capturing fragile moments of time and space for temporary memorials that seem more like intricate paintings than photography. This is how she captures time transpiring -  layered, splintered,  and not frozen in a crystalline single moment. Later, when she looks back at the film, there are many impressions to play with, due to the multiple exposures. The documentation of that moment, location, or shadow exists only partially - and fragmented - in her minds eye, but captured completely by her cameras.

-I think I'm creating images that we are not seeing much in contemporary photography. Now a photograph can't just be a photograph. It has to be dissected, repositioned and analyzed, which can detract from the actual work. It-s like a really well written novel, where the writer is so good that the reader doesn-t see the mechanisms of the writing. It-s all there, effortlessly, because the writer is so skilled, has a vision and knows what they want to communicate, and achieves it.-

As observers, we are fortunate that Leah Oates has the skill and motivation to show us the splendor of the wilderness all around us, while forcing us to acknowledge our own damaging impact on it. Her work is like an excursion through time and space, viewing the natural environment in an unnatural way, forcing us to open our eyes a little wider, and take in the contradictions of ephemeral beauty and society.

issuu.com/abphotographe/docs/focus_magazine_7

Dan Duda and Leah Oates collaborated on the creation of this essay. Leah Oates is a photographer working out of New York City and Dan Duda is a scientific writer living in Lititz, Pennsylvania (USA). This is Dan’s second essay for VJIC on photography and Quantum theory. Leah Oates visual dialog is linked from this essay.

Leah Oates “Humans leave traces and artifacts of our consciousness everywhere in our environment. Contradictory realities can be found co-existing wherever we look. They’re in what we choose to think; what we choose to believe; and, how we choose to act. And, they can be found in what we choose to observe.”

Dan. Why has science become so bizarre? Why does it take a super genius to decipher what reality is all about? Why can’t a scientist say ‘this is how it is,’ in a way that everyone just understands? Well, at least there is a relatively easy answer to those questions. Simply stated, human senses and intellect have developed in a way that is most useful for survival. For example, stereoscopic vision with color perception was valuable for life in forests, trees and plains—comprehending the structure of four levels of the multiverse—not so much. The ability to develop strategies for hunting, gathering and cultivating a continuing food supply is essential. Grasping the significance of wave/particle duality wouldn’t even make it to the current ‘must have for survival’ list. However, a working understanding of these deep issues is critical to our continued technological progress—and understanding existential threats on a macro level just might be needed for the future survival of mankind.

Ironically, art can provide a bridge of understanding to a reality that escapes the severe boundaries of our intuition. Leah Oates is among a group of artists who employs photo techniques that express feelings transcending the limits of our rational perceptive ability.

Leah. When I look back on a moment it’s full of impressions and multiple exposures capture this. I make these exposures on specific frames using a 35mm and medium format camera. This allows me to display a more complete correlation of experiences that a single exposure just misses.

Quantum Tunneling

“According to Quantum Mechanics, a particle has a definite probability of being anywhere in the universe…We can thank [this] Quantum Tunneling for the Sun’s heat.”
Tyler Simko

Dan. There are many recent discoveries in particle physics that bend our rational minds to the breaking point (and sometimes beyond). For example, why does the Sun shine? If you ask a scientist he’ll tell you that the enormous mass of our star causes intense gravity which, in turn, causes atoms of hydrogen to fuse into helium. That, in turn, causes the release of photons. Multiplied by all the atoms in the Sun’s core this generates the radiation produced by the Sun and all the other stars in the universe. But in reality, he would be wrong (or at least not totally right). If you do the math you’ll find that there just isn’t enough force in the core of a star to cause nuclear fusion.

However, if you ask a particle physicist that same question, she will tell you that something called quantum tunneling is required for fusion. The Pauli Exclusion Principle tells us, in part, that no two particles can occupy the same space—the electron cloud will resist any such possibility. But this can be overcome by the more powerful (but extremely rare) action of quantum tunneling. It’s extremely rare, but considering all the material and dynamics at the core of the Sun it happens often enough to cause the Sun to shine providing all the energy we encounter on Earth.

At the root of quantum tunneling is the fact that an individual particle can (and does) exist in more than one place at a time. You’re tempted to say ‘oh well, things are really strange in the sub-microscopic’ world but that doesn’t affect me at all. But in our reality we have to keep in mind that everything is made from these particles—including us.

Prospect park photo strip 11 72Leah. Every moment captured on film is over as soon as the shutter clicks, recording the ephemeral. Yet, in reality, there is always a visual cacophony of experience. The concept of quantum tunneling doesn’t surprise me. We are always living in many realities at once. Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world more accurately.

Wave or Particle

“I insist on the view that ‘all is waves.’”
Erwin Schrödinger

Dan. One of the most outrageous concepts to be proposed in science (or in any other field for that matter) is Erwin Schrödinger’s explanation of the reality of a particle as it moves through space. It really started with Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and a host of other scientists at the beginning of the 1900’s. Their experiments consistently showed that a particle behaved differently when it was observed by a human than when it wasn’t (see the Two Slit Experiment). Albert Einstein (and others) hated this result and the statement it seemed to be making about reality (“God does not play dice with the universe.”). But in spite of an onslaught of attacks, experiment after experiment continues to confirm a weird fact—as matter moves through space (unobserved) it exists as a wave occupying every possible position, and possessing every possible attribute. However, when observed, this “wave” collapses in a single place and with a single set of attributes.

As un-intuitive as wave/particle duality is, it provides, perhaps, the best metaphor for explaining my approach to photography. The wave of possibilities is analogous to what there is to experience. The “observation” is like the click of a shutter that forces the scene to take just one, limited, ephemeral form. Multiple exposure allows me to present a broader range of experience which is actually more accurate of the reality.

Time

“My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes.”
Julian Barbour

Dan. Some scientists feel that what we perceive as time is just change masquerading as our fourth dimension. There’s probably no concept in physics more counter-intuitive than the idea that time doesn’t exist. After all, you started reading this article at one point, but now you’re reading these words. Doesn’t the distance between those two events require a passage of time? Well, within the limited scope of our intuition, time must exist. But we continue to find, time after time, that our innate intuition is far too limited to comprehend reality. And it looks like our perception of time will be another casualty of that limitation.

So, you ask, if time doesn’t exist, at least not as we perceive it, how can we explain the phenomena we experience? Let’s start with our good friend Albert Einstein who said “people like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” For him, the classical understanding of time began to fall apart with his insight on relativity. In that breakthrough theory, time is just another dimension like up/down; backward/forward; and, left/right. And it’s not constant—the speed of time’s passage that affects us depends on the impact of motion and gravity.

Then what is it that occurs making us think that time is passing? According to particle physicist, Julian Barbour, it’s change. “It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.” Some of the most successful equations in physics are completely devoid of a time component.

Time is layered and not frozen into one single moment. Photography is directly connected to time as the camera shoots in fractions of a second. Time is always slipping and fracturing from the present, past and future. We are often living in all these levels at once. But when we’re not, we experience flow—or an absence of time. Multiple exposures are close to the experience of “flow.” When I look at a moment in time I “feel” more than can be recorded with a simple click of the shutter. Standard techniques and even digital capabilities consistently disappoint me. The image never fully reflects what I “saw” or felt. I use multiple exposures on film to record a more accurate picture of how we can recall time transpiring.

Consciousness

Johnjoe McFadden believes that consciousness is an electromagnetic field which escapes (or enters) the body through the synaptic gaps between neurons: “The theory solves many previously intractable problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence, and even life and death,” he said.
-Johnjoe McFadden, School if Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Surrey (UK)

Dan. A neurosurgeon once compared the human brain to the bridge on the Starship Enterprise. He could map a brain, identifying all the control systems. He was amazed at how effective this mapping process could be—it explained almost everything. But he was troubled by one fact—he could never find Captain Kirk. He couldn’t locate the force that activated the controls. The thing that pushes the buttons. The real seat of consciousness.

Professor McFadden’s idea that consciousness is really an electromagnetic field is striking. If true, that would shed new light on a lot of mysteries. In fact, we know that light itself is an electromagnetic (EM) phenomenon. Think about a current theme in sci-fi relating to near death experience: “go to the light,” [Ghost Whisperer] or “stay away from the light.” [Poltergeist] Or religious references “I am the light…” Carl Jung would also be pleased. An EM field would go a long way in explaining his collective unconscious. “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature…” [Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung]. That could be our personal EM interacting with a broader ‘collective,’ or even a universal EM field.

The idea that consciousness might be an electromagnetic field certainly addresses a lot of issues. It might also help explain savants, psychic phenomenon like telepathy, meditation, ghosts, auras, and psychokinesis—to the extent any of those are real. Am I my body—or is my body just something I inhabit? If I’m more than my body—then what, and where am I? In a sense an artist like Leah Oates deals with questions like this. The apparent abstraction of images created with multiple exposure could be a subconscious attempt to portray something our “rational,” intuitive mind just can’t grasp—much less put into words.

Let’s face facts—above all else photography is a process dealing with light. So, if consciousness is somehow tied-into this electromagnetic force, then photography is clearly recording consciousness at one level—or many. The idea of consciousness spilling out of an individual’s brain and mixing into a wider context or environment is a compelling idea. Can my multiple exposure technique help to unveil a better understanding of consciousness? I’m not sure. But I do know that at the heart of this art are feelings that cannot be expressed in words—or even concepts we currently embrace.

Conclusion

“The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate, overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. All phenomenon are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is visible.”
-Peter Mathessen

Dan. There’s a well-worn cliché dealing with progress—“thinking outside the box.” It may be overused as a metaphor, but the action precedes every major breakthrough in science and technology. Copernicus; Galileo; Newton; Einstein; Bohr and others broke the barriers of the state-of-the-art thinking of their times. And the metaphor applies to art as well—Da Vinci; Michelangelo; Monet; Picasso; Adams; Avedon and others broke visual barriers and rewrote the definition of art and the way it communicates. I find it ironic that, so often science and art cross paths intersecting at ‘philosophy.’ They both dig deep into the essence of reality searching for meaning that escapes prevailing intuition. I challenge the reader to look more deeply and ponderously into the art of Leah Oates. The message that emerges may just be more than aesthetic (and it certainly is that)—it may be a fresh glimpse into the true nature of reality.

http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=3819

“Layers,” the summer show at City Without Walls gallery in Newark through almost the end of August, is on the surface an exhibit about technique: Art that lays one brushstroke, or found image, or film exposure atop another qualifies as “layered.” Aimee Hertog, the artist who came up with the idea for the show, paints what resemble Abstract Expressionist pictures that build watercolor, oil, acrylic, really whatever comes to hand, in clearly distinguishable strata.

But layered can also apply to Amy Swartele’s hyper-surreal oil “The Watcher Watched,” with its built-up impasto, or to Luisa Mesa’s collages covered in thick clear resin, in which she has embedded early-20th century photos of her family in bright, patterned mindscapes studded with rhinestones. Mesa is Cuban-American, and lives in Florida.

“I’m fascinated by the passage of time and how it changes your relationships,” Hertog says, “and Luisa’s work is about her ancestors—it’s layered physically, with the found objects she uses in her collages, by the resin, which sort of freezes everything, and by time.

“I think the spiritual poetry of the show is what makes it cohesive,” Hertog continues. “I started with four artists, including myself, whom I wanted to bring together, and Luisa was one. Regina Walker’s photos of peeling posters and paint on New York City walls was a beautiful example of layering in our environment, and April Zanne Johnson’s oil paintings on plexiglass are all about depths and layers of paint.”

City Without Walls is now a virtual community of artists, and Hertog opened the idea to submissions. Out of 30 or so finalists she finally chose 14 artists. Some are graduates—Johnson, for example--of the Montclair State arts program, which is having a bigger impact every year in local art circles. Others attended Bennington, where Hertog studied. What they all brought to that original core of four artists was a completely novel way to think of layering, often beyond two dimensions.

Christine Soccio’s “Hyper” is a good example. Soccio, another Montclair State graduate, places a score or more eyeball-sized spotlights mounted on flexible metal necks around a cube of wavy glass in the center of an empty room. The lights turn the walls into static sponges of wobbly light, as if reflected off water onto the roof of a cave.

Liz Mitchell, born in Morristown and a familiar in the Newark/CWOW orbit, shows her block-printed butterflies on Japanese paper, cut out and folded like a real insect, clustering on a dress pattern suspended from the center of the gallery. The installation dominates the room, the butterflies clustering like Monarchs on a tree branch.

Leah Oates, who runs a gallery in Manhattan, shows a series of photographs taken in Beijing that she calls “Transitory Spaces”—buildings or lots that are either being torn down or abandoned but about to be redeveloped. To convey a much more indefinite sense of time passing than Mesa, Oates layers exposures in the camera that show a landscape seeming to transform in front of your eyes. In a place like Beijing, which was undergoing a pre-Olympics boom in 2008-9, when these pictures were taken, time and the landscape seemed to be collapsing under the pressure of constant construction.

Oates also represents what Hertog calls a growing dissatisfaction in art circles with the “flatness” and ease of PhotoShop, which has become so familiar in design it now delivers a stencil-like sameness. Matt Roberts, for example, says he’s largely a digital photographer, but he also uses a hand-made process that allows multiple layering of near-transparent images that suggest, in their rubbed-out look, decay or peeling. His portrait of Bill Clinton definitely has a certain Dorian Gray quality.

The shift in focus from works like these, with their double-meaning puns on “layering,” to art where the term is entirely technically descriptive, as it is of Leslie Ford’s series of 12-inch-square grid patterns built up out of layers of semi-transparent encaustic (melted, tinted beeswax), is a kind of jazz in your head.

In a way, the gallery is taking the “Layers” concept to the streets: This summer, as part of its Yarn City Project, CWOW is teaching table-top weaving in the gallery, and the students have been “yarn bombing” Lincoln Park a block away, wrapping the trunks of trees with bands—think of them as multi-colored sleeves--of woven yarn.

Boston born and Brooklyn based, Leah Oates, examines how wires cross between elapsed worlds, over time, abstracting the most mundane views into beautifully muddled masses of illuminated energy.

Comparable to dust settling, each seemingly frenetic thread of line and light eventually condenses and glides into an artful circadian rhythm, conceptually, awaking a reaction or need to absorb the shock of our own projected velocities.

Of her work, Oates states, “Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is always in the present yet constantly changing. Oates states "I find them endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.”

New England-born photographer Leah Oates is one of the contributors to Earth, Sea and In Between

The elements take centre stage in a new group show Earth, Sea and Inbetween, including New England-born photographer Leah Oates at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York from September 1. Oates explores the natural landscape and human interaction with it by overlapping negatives of forests and skylines with images of telephone wires and road signs.

Describing her photography, Oates says, "The work I create first originates as a response to sites and objects that are ignored such as piles of trash, alleyways, overpasses or abandoned structures. In most instances the locations that I have shot in are not desirable travel destinations, are generally working class and are in industrial areas. This type of space has a personal resonance for me as I grew up in a very similar location in New England. I have a strong emotional connection, knowledge and familiarity with this kind of locality and want to document it in all of its poignant beauty."

http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/august/24/elements-take-centre-stage-in-photography-show/

Artist, Leah Oates, will present her work in an upcoming show at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York. The exhibition, “Earth, Sea and In Between,” will feature works exploring natural landscapes using unique processes to illustrate movement, form and human interaction with the elements. Oates’ photography responds to sites and objects that are often ignored and articulates the effects of social processes and consumption on the landscape. Her work captures the beauty in the unconventional and the undesirable, and epitomizes the saying, "what is one man's trash is another man's treasure."

In her website biography, Oates states, “The work I create first originates as a response to sites and objects that are ignored such as piles of trash, alleyways, overpasses or abandoned structures. In most instances the locations that I have shot in are not desirable travel destinations, are generally working class and are in industrial areas. This type of space has a personal resonance for me as I grew up in a very similar location in New England. I have a strong emotional connection, knowledge and familiarity with this kind of locality and want to document it in all of its poignant beauty."

Transitory Space, an exhibition featuring multiple exposure photography by New York-based artist Leah Oates, includes recent photographs from her ongoing series that portrays the complex relationships between humans and nature.

The exhibition focuses on Oates’ travels to Beijing, Newfoundland, and New York’s own Van Cortlandt Park and Pelham Bay Park, highlighting the delicate balance between the natural and built environment. Her photographs are lush and at times disquieting, as she documents the breadth of man’s imprint on nature.

Oates’ photographs of New York City parks portray the unexpected beauty of primeval forests and natural botanicals thriving in the cityscape. Her use of multiple exposure photography translates particularly well in her photographs of Newfoundland’s power lines: multiple apertures fuse the lines and branches together making them indistinguishable from each other. A less symbiotic relationship between manmade and organic environments is depicted in her haunting photographs of Chinese hutongs. These historic alleyways condemned for future paved roads and high-rises have been reclaimed in the interim by nature. The sites in Transitory Space are in a constant state of unrest—flush with “messy human energy”—and complicated bonds between individuals and their surroundings.

http://www.nycgovparks.org/art-and-antiquities/arsenal-gallery/2010

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