Stephanie Leitch is well defined in her medium of art installation. Using fundamental elements and principles that are now familiar in Leitch’s oeuvre, such as hanging form and the use of viscous materials, also fundamental is the size and scope of the show which is, expectedly, monumental, to comprise the entire linear space of Nox. But leaving the vast scope and the resultant universe of ideas aside, one might get cozy and snuggle up to some more concrete reality of the work that is a bona fide aesthetic influence of the artist which can be a manageable lens with which to view this incredibly complex work, giving it an earthy realism. This is the idea of corporeality and how this comes to fruition in Leitch’s work. Corporeality specifically refers to the bodily: physically, emotionally and spiritually, and the relational dynamics with its environment inclusive of what it effects and what causes it as well as that which it causes and that which effects it.
Says Leitch, “When I look back as a child, I was always making big 3-dimentional projects, although I did not see it as art.” While she holds a sculpture degree from the University of Utah, she was not interested in the conventional. “I never got a piece of clay and sculpted it or I never chiseled marble. You are satisfied in the process of something and that something pushes you forward. In school, physical spaces that people could walk into and physical passages were that something and still have this effect, something people can walk into.”
However, continues Leitch, “ My experience in school was that you have to experience something with the full body, but you don’t. You experience it spatially.” The conditions of aesthetic spatiality allowing for a total visceral bodily experience by a given art object reflect a disconnect or space that separates the two. “You don’t need to use the body to experience spatiality, the form is relational to the body,” says Leitch. Just as “man is the measure of all things,” the seminal factor and essential element governing an actual spatial experience is the microcosm that represents the essence of form as fundamentally relative to the bodily, according to proposed theory.
Representative of Leitch large professional portfolio of installation that follows upon established aesthetics is a site-specific work using a vacant retail space in Sugarhouse called “Strata.” The large-scale installation has the dramatic visual appeal found in must of Leitch’s installations; a graphic pattern of inverted pyramids is created by suspended distinctly shaped fabric. Each form represents natural processes of water that collect and are eventually released. This release is onto mounds of earth below the form, which is the receptacle of the water, and as such, undergoes a series of change. Leitch is interested in ideas of processes found in the natural Salt Lake environs, the inevitable reality of change and the dynamics of this, and the phenomenology of space and what is means, ultimately, to have a functional collective of elements, such as an ecosystem.
The new installation at Nox is mindfully articulated consisting of an orderly grid of suspended “appendages” from a network of plastic tubing running the length of Nox’s ceiling. Each is a linear continuum of connected plastic components. There are 180 of these “appendages” with an entirety of 6000 components in all. Each component is rendered with a minutia of detail. Along each continuum will run a perpetual “current” from top to bottom for two hours. What these components are and what the “current” is Leitch will not disclose. This is imperative, as predetermination may prejudice the aesthetic spatial experience that Leitch requires for the total success of this project.
“Every form is the evidence of action,” says the artist, who describes her massive self-generated work as “a structure that which gravity acts upon.” This event has a beginning and an end. The skeleton, the 180 hung “appendages” without the “current” process, will remain hung at Nox, with a prominent video on display so the visitor to Nox might engage with the installation. Demonstrative of the validity of spatiality, someone watching the video a week after the event may have an equally profound experience with the art as someone attending the two hour spectacle observing at a distance. Both employ the disconnect and space that define spatiality and each may enjoy a meaningful engagement with the work which is the possibility of spatial aesthetics.
This particular aesthetic approach to the work being the condition of spatiality is but one aspect of corporeality that finds fruition in the reaches of this conceptual instillation. The structure of the work is itself a metaphor in myriad ways to corporeality, and seen in this context, the piece might be considered once more, to ground abstract universals to more tangible earthbound realities. The installation is a process “living itself out in front of the viewer,” says Leitch. The 6000 components are on a continuum each affected countless times by the perpetual “current” within a two hour span with changes in the minutia occurring countless times between these. It is an exhibition that is literally limitless in scope.
Although “these processes are contained in very artificial ways,” says Leitch, there is no reason that this self generated installation could not be called organic in nature and likened to the human body, infinite in its systems. One might consider this as one sees the whole composed of many channels dividing into the separate 180 “appendages.” One might further cogitate personal existence and the course of being as the currents begin, and as the current affects each of the 6000 components in so many changeable and malleable ways, one might see humanity and the free will receptive to phenomena that has no end. This is one manner of conception whereby the spatially receptive viewer might “bring that sensation home;” this signifying a sure place or touchstone.
This living installation, a metaphor for the corporeal, interpreted by a spatial engagement “takes the minute and pushes it to its utmost extent,” says Leitch. The source of infinite wonder in this event, as the current is flowing, is the component itself and the response of the current that occurs upon the minutia. This is in actuality a “phenomenological experience of space and time” although on the most microcosmic scale. As human beings, the mind reacts to universal stimuli with a sublime sense of wonder and awe, such as gazing as a starry night, but this is vast and not definitive. But, as the mind, heart and spirit, that of the corporeal that is most equivocal, observes phenomena on a minute scale, experiences random nuance, responds to tenderness, enjoys simplicity, appreciates the delicate, this is when the corporeal is steadily at home, in a sure place of being in space and time, and utterly definitive. This corporeal metaphor found beyond the grandiosity within the fabric of the installation.
According to the artist “I am always working between structure and chaos. It’s always building between these two, throughout my work,” she says. One can observe as one witnesses the “event” the precise order of form from a distance, but looking closer into the minutia of the components and how the current responds, there is a complete lack of order, not even randomness, there is chaos; but it is a beautiful thing. It encourages one to embrace the chaos in one’s own life, to appreciate the irregularities, the oddities, the ups and downs, “keep the self weird” says the self to the self. Order can be impressive but too often untouchable. Chaos can be blissfully accessible and often signify the parts of life most worth remembering. The journey is full of chaos and for the wisest; enjoy the journey that with willingness and gratitude will never end. These life lessons, gleaned through a “holistic, visceral and non-verbal way.”
In these 180 “appendages” suspended from the ceiling of Nox with a current affecting changes untold, each viewer, a part of the whole but uniquely progressing, is no different. Each is engaged in a current with phenomena untold, a profound mystery to each other and the self. These are ideas, gleaned through a lens of corporeality that one “might get cozy and snuggle up to.” Art is one medium one might find a little of one’s own being in a monumentally ambitious yet sublimely delicate installation. This is naturally the case that results from an artist of Leitch’s creative scope of vision, an artist whom herself might seem delicate initially, but in actuality a tour de force of artistic capacity and capability, a cogent artistic will power, unstoppable.
“Utah Art Critically; Art Critiques by A Native, Seasoned, Utah Writer." *UNEDITED* 