LEIGH ANNE LANGWELL

(Photo credit: Leigh Anne Langwell, “Drift”; Juror’s Selection)

Leigh Anne Langwell’s photograms burst across the paper surface like so many dying stars and exploding galaxies, the stuff of science fiction or microscopic cellular analysis – either/or would fall in line with Langwell’s thinking.

She writes:

My professional background in biological and medical imaging has had a considerable impact on my artistic process. My earlier work was specifically concerned with the historical conventions of scientific imaging that often appeared in outdated scientific texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What I found interesting were the outmoded conventions of logic that dictated how the information was presented in relationship to a body of presumed facts that were either no longer valid or had simply ceased to exist outside of their own obsolete relationships. When the context of these images ceased to adequately inform them, fact became rather pliant metaphor that called into question the veracity of the nature of observation and the presumed objectivity of both the observer and the scientific document itself.