Leesa Streifler

Poignant images of the body invoke pathos and whimsy.

by

Leesa Streifler’s new paintings at the Last Mountain Lake Cultural Centre in Saskatchewan, provide a glimpse into the artist’s practice during a year of events: COVID-19, retirement from the University of Regina, a move to Winnipeg, her mother’s death in a personal care home, and the interiorization and reflection that characterize artistic practice over the last 18 months. Loss, change and transformation through the weigh station of the body underlie the 20 works in the show, Continua, on view until Oct. 17 in Regina Beach.

A consummate colourist, Streifler, who has taught life drawing for over 30 years, offers a no-holds-barred take on her musings – the body as gesture, as imaginative figment, as an ageing firmament and on its connectedness in relationships through sleeping and coupling, as well as its links to dreams and the unconscious. 

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Leesa Streifler, “Connection: couples sleeping,” 2020

Leesa Streifler, “Connection: couples sleeping,” 2020

acrylic on paper, 50″ x 38″ each (photo by Gary Robins)

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Leesa Streifler, “Connection: couples sleeping,” 2020

Leesa Streifler, “Connection: couples sleeping,” 2020

acrylic on paper, 50″ x 38″ (photo by Gary Robins)

There is whimsy and pathos, a breadth of emotion that characterizes Streifler’s practice. Previous exhibitions asserted her interest in the female body, the tenets of feminism, and a vivid expressionism realized through photography, painting, texts and performance in both over-large works and the intimate scale of photography’s vernacular.

Streifler’s colour photographs in the National Gallery of Canada are more than 10 feet tall, while earlier exhibitions, such as Contained or Normal, used a smaller format to play with the subject positions of women and stereotypes related to size, appearance and gender. 

These latest works in acrylic, oil and crayon on paper are close to life size, and are unframed on the wall, installed in series as single elements or in dyptichs and triptychs. 

The paint handling in bold monochromes, the lack of framing and the starkly naked bodies force a confrontation with the viewer. There’s a kind of provisional and fleeting quality to the materials and themes, yet we are asked not to look away. 

Streifler’s non-naturalistic and expressionistic colour delineates the outlines of bodies in gestures of repose, in embraces or cold shoulders, in love making and in the singularities of standing. Here are hapless acrobatic bodies in hot pink; sleeping and naked couples in cobalt blue, brown sienna or golden ochre; combinations of women, men and dogs, in youth and old age.

While the effect in some works is a raw and crude engagement with a simple, disassembling brush stroke, here too, is the careful realism of an expertly rendered nude, an expressionist extra limb and, when you least expect them, jewel-like colours. Streifler has consistently challenged herself with explorations in painting – limiting colours, painting in reverse behind glass, and working both with miniatures and a gigantic scale. 

Portraiture is not the issue here, rather it’s the shape and expression of the body in its poignant, funny, tender and terrifying moments. Dogs are lovingly naturalistic. Youth is supplanted by the haunting portrait of impending old age, the body compressed by time. 

Streifler works neither from photographs nor observational models. Instead, she recalls figments and gestures in her imagination, translating them through emotion and years of anatomical study. Her versatility in exploring themes of connection and loss lead us through fascination, joy, wistfulness and recognition. 

The show includes a few pieces with more narrative allegories of sleeping and dreaming, which have fascinated artists from Courbet and Rousseau through to Rodney Graham and Sophie Calle. Streifler’s capacity for expression has been filtered, but not dulled, through a year of turmoil and loss. ■  

Continua: New Work by Leesa Streifler at the Last Mountain Lake Cultural Centre in Regina Beach, Sask., from Aug. 7 to Oct.17, 2021. A second show, Continua: Shared Foundation, features work by eight students in Streifler’s first painting and drawing classes in the 1980s and 1990s: Michel Boutin, Diana Chabros, Holly Fay, Ernie Klinger, Jennifer McRorie, Erik Norbraten, Sheila Nourse and Wendy Peart.

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Last Mountain Lake Cultural Center

133 Donovel Crescent, Last Mountain, Saskatchewan S0G 4C0

306-729-4484

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