Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video and text. Ledare’s exhibition, Too Late and Later, centers around a unique body of work, which forms an archive of the artist’s relationship with his mother whilst creating a discursive site. As such the exhibition traces the negotiation of their respective relationships to agency, representation and authorship, alongside issues proposed by the enactment of the contents of this project in the context of the real world.
At the age of fifty, already having begun to cultivate a highly sexualized persona, Ledares mother, Tina Peterson, a former professional ballerina, approached her son to document her for posterity. The photographs exist neither as a diaristic work, nor simply as portraits of a highly sexualized persona, but as an investigation of the nature of our formation as subjects and its relation to broader shifting cultural forces. Shown in this instance alongside 3 videos, Ledare’s portraits of his mother reveal subversive responses, instances of sexuality and vulnerability tactically deployed to multiple economic, personal and psychological ends. Ledare proposes that his mother’s complex subjectivity stems not form a failure to perform a multitude of various roles, but from a simultaneous occupation of an abundance of imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled.
Leigh Ledare is born in Seattle, Washington in 1976. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Pretend You’re actually alive, was held at Les Recontres de Arles, Arles. France 2009. Ledare has also exhibits at the Swiss Institute New York (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); and Prague Biennale (2009). Leigh Ledare lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. He is currently Visiting Professor of Photography and Media at California Institute for the Arts.
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