WORKS
Rollin Leonard is an artist who works with water. To construct his portraits and sculptures, Leonard creates “water lenses” by manipulating water on glass to physically refract and distort photographic images of human faces, bodies, trees, microbes, diamonds, fur, stars, and other materials. He often uses himself as the subject in his work, playing roles for the camera. Lindsay Preston Zappas for KCRW Art Insider wrote: “Though self-portraiture is one of art history’s oldest genres, Leonard’s innovative techniques elevate the medium to new process-driven heights.”
What emerges are his original, hypnotic, and monstrous collectives or multiplicities that mirror the interconnectivity of the living world. Leonard first became known as part of the “Net-Art” movement in the early 2010s. His work is sometimes called “a simulation of a simulation” because it looks hyperreal but is created through working with analog materials. Each of Leonard’s creatures exist within the artist’s personal ecosystem, a kind of speculative fiction made up of animal-plant-rock hybrids that might emerge from the ruins of climate apocalypse.
Raised in Wisconsin, Leonard lives in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of the Moving Image NYC, biforms NYC, Transfer Gallery NYC, Postmasters Gallery in NYC, Haus Der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Carnegie Museum of Art, SFMoMA, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the CMCA Museum in Maine, the Whitney Museum in NYC, and elsewhere.
ABOUT FACE, Hunter Shaw Fine Arts 2022
Lucid dreaming in a boing boing of vampire shrimp
2024
31” D
Resin, photograph, board
Prickle of pink and blue urchin, cut wide open
2024
31” D
Resin, photograph, board
Generation of green vipers
2024
31” D
Resin, photograph, board
Smile Demon
2020-2021
60” D
Resin, photograph, board
Smile Demon is a reference to the smiling yellow icon that has been popular since the 1960s. This is a self portrait, with the face painted yellow. Like a cluster of emoji melted into a terrifying smiling sun, Smile Demon is kind of grinning god that contains multitudes.
Hover of rainbow trout
2023-2024
31” ø
Urethane resin, Silver Halide photograph, painted board
Gleam of diamonds eaten in the dark
2023-2024
33” ø
Urethane resin, Silver Halide photograph, painted board
Rainbow Demon
2020-2021
60” D
Resin, photograph, board
The rainbow colors in Rainbow Demon are very tightly compacted, like mixing a multicolored taffy until it blurs into noise. Cheeky, mythic, and uncanny, the Demons appear on the wall like talismans. The series are large, puzzled collages of resin-domed photographs. What separates them from the other resin-domed wall sculptures is they are faces made of faces. Created by shooting hundreds of expressions from grins to grimaces through droplets of water, the demons smirk at the viewer as they quite literally possess our myriad micro-expressions and mercurial moods in the many resin drops that make up their features.
Kissing Underwater
2015-2018
36” by 18”
Resin, photograph, board
Ophanim
2020
30” D
Resin, photograph, board
Models include a closeup photo of an eye and Mud Golem (Wet)
The Ophanim comes from the Book of Revelation and is composed of swirling arms and hundreds of eyes. Here my Ophanim is made of mud, eyeballs, and faces.
Leaf Water Figure 1
2019
24.6 by 28.9 inches / 63 by 73 centimeters
Resin, photograph, board
The subject was a leaf.
Meat Water Figure 2
2019
11.9 by 22.1 inches / 30 by 56 centimeters
Resin, photograph, board
The subject was a piece of raw steak.
Meat Water Figure 3
2019
17.5 by 29.3 inches / 45 by 75 centimeters
Resin, photograph, board
The subject was a piece of raw steak.
Water Portraits
2014-2015
This series were all portraits of friends living in Portland Maine. Each picture transforms the face into a new organism. The resin-coated photographed are adhered directly to the wall.
Splatter
2014
437 individual photographs of my face refracted in water, cut out, and domed with resin. The installation and scale is variable.
I made this for a traveling solo show at XPO Gallery Paris and TRANSFER Gallery NYC in 2015.
This was the first work I made by photographing through water on glass. I rigged a camera over a bed, and laid on my back for a week moving water around to collect each individual droplet. I think of Splatter as my “seminal” work—quite literally replicating myself as series of globs. The work also has a horror element to it, with the individual pieces slithering up the wall as if they are going to re-form back into one body. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large—I contain multitudes.”
