Art in the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library: Leah Naomi

Leah Rees, a native of North Georgia, was an architecture major at the University of Kentucky.  From a young age, she found art to be a tool for communication as well as a way to pass time.  Her primary interest in within the process of creation.  In her recent work this often embodies the moment of conception through a simplification of form and process.  Rees finds the exploration of form in architectural study to be about the emotive and sensual experience of space.

From the Breadth of Art: a Student Exhibition in January-February 2012, Rees states about her pieces: "My practice of visual expression began as a method of personal reflection.  Through the recollection of numerous journeys between Kentucky and Georgia completed in my life, the Appalachian landscape has been amassed into indefinite impressions.  Painting has become a mechanism to allow an understanding of my connection to this homeland.  Creating contact between the surface and myself is a reflection of my personal narrative, and a spiritual exploration of memory.  The current series of work strives to escape understandable scale, while continuously shifting perspective.  The use of valuemodulation assists in the complex arrangement of the abstracted landscape, allowing an ambiguous relationship between void and form.  The rhythmic attributes of these visual qualities are intended to move continuously, capturing the gaze and providing prolonged investigation."

Twilight (2011). Photo by Ashlee Chilton.

Illumination (2011).