Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Leah Oates

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Leah Oates

What was the first book you remember picking and reading yourself?
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Winnie the Pooh.

What was the last book you read that made you say damn, that was a good book?

​I recently read and loved Margaret Atwood’s new bio a Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.

Which artists have influenced your current artistic direction?

​The artists who inspire me are Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Hockney, Georgia O'Keeffe, Rembrandt, Degas, Velázquez,  Goya, Turner, Helen Levitt, Yoko Ono, Diane Arbus, Sebastião Salgado, Robert Frank, Frida Kahlo, Lee Friedlander, Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeois. 

Is there an artist in your local community that you would recommend people check out?

Check out Pierre St-Jacques work: https://www.pierrestjacques.com/index.html

What advice would you give someone just starting to send their work to journals?
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Follow the instructions and send in your best work for consideration.

Artist's 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 fluctuations 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 I look back on a moment it’s full of impressions and multiple exposures  capture this. I 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 and we live in many realities at once.  Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world as our perception is not fixed.

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.
When I look back on a moment it’s full of impressions and multiple exposures  capture this. I 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 and we live in many realities at once.  Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world as our perception is not fixed.

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 has B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.  Oates has had solo shows in NYC, Toronto and in Chicago at Remote Gallery,  Susan Eley Fine Art, Artemisia Gallery, The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, Real Art Ways, The Brooklyn Public Library and at the MTA Arts. Oates has been in group shows in the NYC area and in Toronto at John. Aird Gallery, Arta Gallery, Papermill Gallery, Wave Hill, Edward Hopper House and The Pen and Brush.
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NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art