To call what Leslie Shows creates paintings is limiting, because her forms involve much more than paint and none of them are on a canvas — include materials like sand, acrylic, Plexiglass, aluminum leaf, and silk. By making analogies to geological processes like sudden ruptures or glacially slow erosion, Shows wants to explode the idea of an artwork from the borders we impose on it, whether that be the rectangular gilt frames that hang on museum walls to the concept that art must be fully formed in the artist's head, static, or even final. She has stumbled upon post-landscapes.
By reveling in the technical challenges of printing on sand or the labor-intensive techniques of rubbing away a hard metal surface, Shows might be considered an artist's artist. But while there's a sense of humor and play to her cerebral approach, there's nothing glib or tart about it.
"I like the deceptiveness," she said. "It's important. Some things seem like they happen really fast. [One form's shape] is from a doodle, but there's a long process. A sense of immediate, offhand decision gives it a bendy-time element ... They're referencing their own making."
And they require a lot of comfort with ambiguity on the viewer's part. The parallels between how geologic time-scale operates, how the mind generates ideas, and how those ideas become realized are challenging. To execute this, Shows makes use of collage to the point where the temporal boundaries of a given work dissolve.
"I actually collaged something from something I made in 2005, an old painting," she said. "The imagery can be continually switched out, and a lot of it is repeated in here. I want [each work] to continually stay open and relate to its neighbor and relate to the past, to previous work. I'm excited for all the possibilities of that, how paintings can re-fragment."
Pointing to a ghostly, prismatic layer that jumps out from all the earth tones on one form, she said, "This is a scanner glitch. They're cutting and stealing from each other, mimicking each other in different materials, this drawing with sand on the Plexiglass, and there's a shape in that that's repeated on the end. The drawings are little doodles but through the repetition, they harden into a motif. If its gets repeated enough, it becomes more and more entrenched in reality."
It's like the mind getting fixated on idea, or the way strata of rock accumulate over eons.
Shows is an alumna of SFAI, and sits on its faculty, and while she no training in the hard sciences, she's interested in how matter is organized. Whether that's the regularity of a crystal or the randomness of a messy pile is not all that important for Shows. She would rather seduce us with the potential for one to become the other.
She wants the forms to suggest something specific, "but it's more the suggestion of specificity" than any one conclusion she wants us to draw, she said. More than anything, it's a reaction against the way we have been trained to make (and consume) art. Shows finds the emphasis on fixed meanings to be nothing but oppressive.
The second, smaller show is G. H. Rothe: Seven Paintings. A marvel of understatement, that subtitle gives no indication that the works depict a subject matter that some people will find shocking, as well as a major departure from Rothe's known body of commercial work: geriatric sex. These are not portraits of active seniors from a Centrum Silver ad; the lovers look to be in their late 80s, if not older. Naked, bald, usually toothless, and sometimes of indeterminate gender, the figures are nonetheless smiling, caressing one another tenderly, and stimulating their genitalia almost as if they're performing for us. Showing breasts that sag to where they look like they're coming to rest at the bottom of the canvas, the Seven Paintings may not be beautiful in the commonly understood sense, but they are wonderful to see.
Discovered by Rothe's son in the years after her death, the series problematizes what it means to be a public or private artist. Why does someone who, as curator Hessie McGraw puts it, showed mostly "in galleries at Fisherman's Wharf" suppress work that might vault her into the academy? What does it mean when we can no longer ask Rothe about paintings that would change her reputation? Why are we surprised when someone who painted horses and ballerinas had a libidinous streak?
As for the degree to which Shows and Rothe's exhibits converse with one another, that is up for each individual viewer to decide. (McGraw is reluctant to say too much and "curatorially instrumentalize" the two exhibits, yoking together two projects that work to resist definitive statements of meaning.) At the very least, here is a through-line between post-portraits and post-landscapes, but that hardly covers everything. For her part, Shows is mesmerized more by Rothe's technique than by her subject matter.
"She's abstracting body forms. It's a completely fascinating lens to see bodies through," she said. "I get a window into her thought process. There's a really careful thoughtfulness, a cheeky performance aspect."
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