Gina Leon
Artist Statement
When I was a child I had lazy eye. I had surgery at the age of 6 or 7 and there was a period of time where I was learning eye exercises to build muscles that would keep my eye in alignment, if I worked diligently at strengthening these muscles I could control how I was seeing. My eye would straighten in a sense by squinting or making an image hazy. The question of sight or how my eyes were perceiving the world, was something that occupied a lot of space in my childhood. Seeing the world was a big deal and to be compromised in some way might mean seeing something distorted…I became fixed on this idea of seeing things in my corner of the world. I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Seeing and not seeing were these coexisting themes all the time, by not seeing the atrocities of a country in racial and political upheaval, you might live more peaceably, in denial of a country crying, bleeding, waling for the end of Apartheid. If you did see, it was horrific. As a child, seeing these divides, meant feeling so many uneasy things I couldn’t articulate. I had a hunger to express, maybe this is what compelled me to move into acting, visual art and mural making. My work as an artist has been varied from painting to mural making. I am interested in memory and connection. Connecting the Dots - a series of 100 pieces –This series began as a triptych that evolved into a collection of 60 interconnected pieces. I have a sense it will be completed at 100 interconnected pieces. When I started this project, I was intent on painting a narrative that says something about connection. I was interested in the delicate little fibers that bridge together, people, places and thing. Sometimes these are the subtle and unspoken transitional moments in life somewhere between memory and self, memory and place, memory and people. What I discovered is that memories are fragmented, but layered, the definition of self is forever changing, and places hold memories, as much as people hold them.