Erin Leland’s residency will culminate on November 6 in an exhibition and artist talk through her findings on the subject of reclaiming one’s own image.
She is currently reinterpreting her own image through autobiographical retellings as well as examining where and how often one is caught unaware by their own reflection. Leland’s archive with another artist, Michael, is also at the heart of the work.
Beginning two years ago, Leland appeared in a series of photographs with Michael. They were not collaborators, but two people sharing a group of pictures. The images are not by rule explicit, but many are. Michael had also been her art teacher. Michael died on the day that Leland took these photographs down from a gallery. She excerpted her edit from the only photographs he gave her – some, a few thousand, not all of them. His face is absent in the pictures she has shown. He passed away without a will leaving the photographs to no one. The archive of the ten-thousand pictures remains with his two sons in a locked computer under heavy password protection. Leland wishes to compile the photographs (those she owns and those she has never owned), the written correspondences between herself and Michael, and her written request to his sons for her image, into a book.
The book will take the factual elements of the possessed photographs, their status as heavily protected, withheld, then inadvertently slighted, as a starting point. The book will not only be collected material, but a written fiction described through legal and imagined ownerships.
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