Tara Leach | The Eternal Question

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Tara Leach, “Chock Full (detail),” no date

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception: 12 December 2024 7:00 pm

By painting family photos and advertising art from the eras of significance to Tara Leach’s matrilineal family (most notably the 1920s/30s, 1950s/60s, 1980s, 2010s, and present day) the artist temporarily overcomes the linear nature of time. As a photograph can grant access to an instant in the past, her paintings stretch time, spending hours with a millisecond, carefully observing, reconsidering, recombining, reforming and re-contextualizing details according to the artist’s feelings and intuition. That manipulated time is time spent with ancestors and descendants, past and future, and the paintings and collages that emerge from it, sourced from snapshots and vintage advertisements, use a blended visual language of dated marketing propaganda and expressionistic mysticism. Inevitably, the series is about the crushing obligation of being a legacy, and the joyful responsibility of being a forebear.