Artist Statement

Leigh Beisch is a California-based artist working across photography and painting. Her practice explores perception, landscape, and the shifting boundaries between the recognizable and the abstract.

Beisch is drawn to moments of transition—where a body begins to dissolve into water, where a landscape becomes an arrangement of color and form, or where the familiar becomes difficult to name. In her photographic series Submerged, this dissolution becomes more personal: the body moves between presence and absence, suggesting a sense of the self becoming less fixed, dissolving, and at times disappearing altogether.

Working from both observation and memory, Beisch uses abstraction as a way of slowing down the act of looking and allowing an image to remain open to interpretation. Across mediums, her work considers the relationship between the physical and the imagined, and the ways our surroundings can become intertwined with memory and identity.

Rather than describing a place or subject literally, Beisch is interested in what remains when its boundaries become uncertain: fragments of color, light, gesture, atmosphere, and sensation.

Education

Rhode Island School of Design
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Photography, 1990

University of California, Berkeley Extension
Post-Baccalaureate Studies in Painting

School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Undergraduate studies, 1988–1989

Additional coursework in art, philosophy, and art theory at:

  • University of Chicago

  • Brown University

  • Boston University

  • School of Visual Arts, New York

  • San Francisco Art Institute

Selected Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

Bodies of Land
Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, California

Bodies of Land
Gallery 16, San Francisco, California

Bodies of Land
Modern Book Gallery, Palo Alto, California

Selected Group Exhibitions

In the Abstract
O'Hanlon Center for the Arts, Mill Valley, California

Landscape Group Exhibition
Julie Zener Gallery, San Anselmo, California

Focus on Photography
Zener Schön Gallery, Mill Valley, California

Anniversary Exhibition
Zener Schön Gallery, Mill Valley, California

AIDS Benefit Exhibition
Online

Collections & Installations

Permanent installation, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts