Leah Oates: Transitory Space #10

Leah Oates, Transitory Space, Prospect Park. Brooklyn, NYC #9, Colour Photography, 2021-2022

Transitory Space #10: Nova Scotia, NYC and Toronto
Solo Show by Leah Oates

March 30 – April 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 30, 2025, 6 – 8pm
Remote Gallery, Toronto

Artist Statement:

The Transitory Space series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes and this series articulates fluctuation in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.

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.

When one looks back on a moment it’s full of impressions and multiple exposures capture this. Oates make multiple exposures on specific frames in camera which allows me to display a more complete correlation of experiences that a single exposure just misses.

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. We are always living in many realities at once. Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world more accurately.

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the
present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive
places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are
temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.

Leah Oates, Transitory Space, Nova Scotia Colour Field #135, Colour Photography, 2015-2016

From The Transitory Instinct Essay by David Gibson
The Photographs of Leah Oates
The Other Side of the Desk Blog
July 7, 2023

Photography has long been considered mainly as expression in the service of a language of the eye. Yet certain practitioners of the form have achieved impressive disciplines that diverge from this assumption. They have taught us that the act of looking changes the object of attention, and that by also changing the rules and by consequence the expectations, of that act, they can also redefine the role that photography can fulfill. They give us more than an eyeful; they alter time itself.

Oates is just such a photographer. Her vision is by turns darkly psychological, instinctually immediate, and reflectively transcendent. Her photographs dating back through 2021 are especially moving. Oates has over time expressed a single concept, of the impermanence of her subject despite every effort to have it formally bestilled. Despite the popularity and abundance of means of creating digital images, Oates’ works are achieved via traditional analog means as creative interpretations and experimentation with the physical material of film itself. This allows her to maintain both a technical skill and creative authority that rest on their own laurels.

Luckily, the image in Oates’ care is never just an image. It owes a debt to a vision that’s always in motion, like nature itself, and the evolution of human consciousness. Likewise, it’s impossible to view multiple images from Leah Oates’ continuing oeuvre without being personally transformed. As chance dictates the range of possible effects within her work, so will chance allow us to enter it where we are most able, and to travel instinctually from one image to the next, creating an imaginary narrative patched together from random moments of sensory overload. These photographs place us at the threshold between reason and imagination. where an instinct for the transitory is both a requirement and a pleasure.

Leah Oates, Transitory Space, Cedarvale Ravine, Toronto, Colour Photography, 2024-2025

Biography:

Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for graduate study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

Oates has been part of group shows in the Toronto area at John. Aird Gallery, Propeller Gallery, Gallery 1313, Remote Gallery, Arta Gallery, Gladstone Hotel, Contact Gallery, The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and The Papermill Gallery.

Oates has had solo shows in the NYC area at Susan Eley Fine Art, The MTA Lightbox Project at 42nd Street, The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, The Open Center, The Center for Book Arts and The Brooklyn Public Library Main Branch and had had solo show nationally and internationally at Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Long Island, Artemisia Gallery in Chicago and at Galerie Joella in Turku, Finland.

Oates has been in group shows in America at Wave Hill, Edward Hopper House, Chashama, Williamsburg Art Center, Metaphor Projects Gallery, Usagi NYC, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Nurture Art Gallery and The Pen and Brush Gallery.

Oates had press and been featured in numerous publications including Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art Magazine, Junto Magazine, Magazine 43, Underexposed Magazine, Ruminate Journal, Mud Season Review, dArt Magazine, The Tulane Review, The Six Hundred Journal, Blue Mesa Review, Friends of the Artist, GASHER Journal, Flumes Literary Journal and the 805 Lit + Art Journal.

www.leahoates.com
Instagram @leahoates19
Facebook @leah.oates1

Remote Gallery
568 Richmond Street West
Toronto, ON M5V 1Y9
Hours: Thursday to Sunday from 2 – 6pm and by appointment
www.akincollective.com/remote
gallery@akincollective.com

Remote Gallery is Accessible